


set those sails

by trinastry (rogerdavist)



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Coming of Age, Coping, Existential Angst, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jason has ADHD, Jason's just a typical college kid, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Canon, Suicide Attempt Mention, and PTSD too probably, doing his best in school instead of dealing with his problems, no decent sleep schedule, trying to fight God, weed/alcohol mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-10-08 10:50:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17385104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rogerdavist/pseuds/trinastry
Summary: Jason turned twenty-two years old, a mere few weeks ago, blowing the candles out on a homemade cake with his mother and step-father and their absolutely ancient dog. He doesn’t make a wish. He was graduating in the spring with high honors, two majors. He’d been interviewing with law schools and they had gone swimmingly. He’d been working on his photography portfolio and earned high praise from his professors. He liked his friends. He liked his shitty apartment. He liked the steady and stressful and boring in and out of his daily life and taking pictures of it when he could. Jason had grown up. He didn’t need a wish. He doesn’t believe in that anyway.(or: Jason tries to understand his father, four years after his death, for a school project)





	1. there's a key to every door, that's what our hero found

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I'm writing fanfiction again in 2019 I'm truly old as DIRT.
> 
> This is my disclaimer: I'm not a photography major, I've never lived in New York, I'm not Jewish. I've done as much googling as I can about the second two, the first one I'm taking some artistic liberties with for the sake of drama. Wah-wah.
> 
> Another, less serious disclaimer: I also started writing this before I realized that Jason would have to be born in like mmmmm September-December 1968 for the timeline of Falsettos to work (I think Anthony Rosenthal gave out invitations to Jason's Bar Mitzvah and they were dated for late September for BroadwayCon last year, correct me if I'm wrong) but then I decided I didn't care and wasn't gonna change it and wanted Whizzer to have more time and wanted to use the weather as a plot device so WHATEVER February 1969 it is!!! Marvin rounds months up and calls his 12 years and 3-ish (?) months son 12 and a half so sue him!!!! It's hardly his worst quality!!!
> 
> Title from "Set Those Sails" from In Trousers.

_Click._

It was less intense than a full-on whiplash, the kind you’d get when you're supposed to be falling asleep but you feel more like you’re falling, period. You know, that flash of air-time that was different from waking up from a nightmare, with that distinct life-or-death fear making a world of meaning out of a split-second. This _click_ of sorts he’d just experienced wasn’t like jolting awake from a nightmare, it just kind of _happened_. It was more like a quick snap of the fingers, or flipping on a light switch. Innocent enough, but it was the kind of click that could change the temperature of the room, of its inhabitants, could change a mind, could halt the run-on sentences Jason had thought in for as long as he could remember.

Like the click-flash of a polaroid, the image of that moment spilled out and waited patiently for clarity; Jason had come to not one, but two, stark realizations.

One—he didn’t understand his father.

Two—God could probably stand to turn off the flash, huh?

Context: Jason was sitting on a fire escape outside his apartment, a joint balanced carefully between his fingers, trying to peek at the stars past the ferocious glow of the city between his roommates, their legs dangling off the ledge. It was a balmy Friday night in early March, and at this point in their college careers they were all too bored of dorm parties, too tired to actually go out, but too bored to not do anything. Jason welcomed the chance to clear his mind—with graduation only a few months away, he had a lot on his plate, and he was never one to eat when working.

Ben and Marnie were both in the same boat. Overworked and burning out and showing it, the trio had set a very strict “no school talk” rule for their thrilling Friday night plans. Thrilling plans, meaning, smoking weed out of their 10th floor apartment and not changing out of their zip-up hoodies and sweatpants.

It started with not Jason, not Marnie, but Ben—as he did with most rules, was the first to break this one.

“You know, this might be one of the last nights we can do something like this,” he’d said on a long inhale, spewing the warm smoke into the cold of night.

Marnie groaned, head rolling back and feet kicking the air. “Why would you even say something like that?"

"I've always been a sentimental," said Ben.

"Don't lie," said Jason.

"I hate it when people talk like that," Marnie continued, "and make me remember that we’re graduating and becoming adults and shit.”

“No school talk,” reminded Jason, taking the blunt from Ben and taking a long, practiced drag.

“No after-school talk either,” said Ben, “if one more person asks me what my plans are for after graduation, I’m going to lose my fucking mind, or whatever’s left of it, anyway.”

Marnie shook her head. "That’s not what I meant, and you both know it.”

“Then what did you mean?”

Both Ben and Jason turned their heads to look at her after she took a few long moments to answer. Marnie was pretty in this light. Jason wished he’d had his camera, but being back through the window sitting in its bag by the door, it was too far away. The light of the city was catching her afro, her black painted nails through the smoke of the blunt, her wistful expression that wasn’t quite sad, wasn’t quite happy, in a way that made it seem like all of New York wanted to hear what she had to say, right now. It would’ve been a good portrait, if Jason was into that kind of thing. Maybe it would’ve cheered her up, out of this funk she’d been in, they’d all kind of been in tonight.

“I just,” the tension of the portrait moment broke and was gone, forced out by whatever goofy, nonsensical face Marnie was making right now. Way to go, Marn. “So y’all know I’m a big fat lesbian right?”

Ben and Jason, in near unison, released a facetious and dramatic _“noooo wayyyy”_ before the trio broke into a quick laugh. There it is, this was who they were. This was one of those things they’d learned over the last four years to lean on each other’s humor for; the sky was blue, the grass was green, Marnie was a huge out-and-proud lesbian and her boys were proud of her for it.

“Secret’s out I guess?” she laughed.

Jason shook his head at Marnie and whispered, “it was never a secret,” and she elbowed him in the gut. Ben snatched the blunt from her, and through his teeth, teased something about her fingernails that Jason didn’t quite pick-up until Marnie reached around him to punch Ben in the arm.

“But you see? _This_ is my point,” Marnie said, waving vaguely at the air, at the buildings, at the them. “ _This_. I’m _out_. I’m _happy_. I come home to this apartment, my roommates bully me because they love me. I go to school, half the theatre department’s gay anyway, no one cares I like girls. I live life! No one I talk to on a regular basis gives a single shit that I'm a lesbian! And it’s awesome.

“And I’m worried," Marnie's gaze dropped, disappointment ebbing across her face. "Once we graduate and leave, it’s gonna go back to how it was before, that I’m gonna have to stay in the closet to feel safe again.”

Something in the air had begun to change, Jason could feel it, his long, sleepy inhales and exhales turning a pace more alert. Suddenly the fabric material of his sweatshirt was noticeable on his skin, the cold air prickly on his cheeks. He reached for the blunt, his brows furrowed.

Jason had been here, in this feeling, before.

“What was it like?” asked Ben.

“What was what like?”

“Being in the closet,” Jason finished for him, frank, wagging his foot aimlessly.

“Not just that but like,” Ben wait, he wanted to say. Ben, hold on. Wait a second. Let Jason catch his breath, please. “Your dad’s a pastor, right? In upstate New York? That sounds fuckin scary, Marn.”

Marnie kind of shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t just scared. That was some of it. I felt trapped too. Lonely.

“But I guess more than anything, I felt angry.”

Click.

Jason thought of his dad before he could stop himself.

“I don’t even recognize the person I was at the time, I was so mad at everyone, all the time, for everything.” Dad. “That it just made me more lonely, that it made more angry that it—” Dad. “I just let it build up more and more, you know? Until I felt like I was completely helpless.”

Ben nodded, Jason nodded harder.

“And I never want to go back to that. Never never never.”

With every _never_ Marnie uttered, a little bit more of that _something_ was pulled out of Jason, like the wind had been yanked from every corner of his body, only to be replaced with the image of his father, from that very specific time in his life when things started to change for him. The stupid green blazer that didn’t match anything he wore, the way he always looked morbid and unimpressed, the way he’d stopped being funny and started being mean. Jason wasn’t one to avoid thinking of his father, but not like this. Not without precedent, not with so much force. There was something here that he just didn't _get._

There once was a man named Jason. He wasn’t stupid. He went to college. Dual-majored in political science and photography. Shared spaces with the most upper cookie-crusts and the absolute societal rejects and knew how the world treated both. He knew the world was too big to see from the even the top of his apartment building, or the Empire State building, or his father’s shoulders. He remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders and never trying to understand him in the way he immediately understood dumbass Republican trust fund kids or Marnie or his seat on his apartment’s fire escape or the rest of the life he’d built for himself. He thought he didn’t have to try to understand his father. He wasn’t stupid. He was smart. So what didn’t he understand?

The weed wasn’t helping matters.

“Jason, are you okay? Earth to Jason.” A hand waved in front of his face. Marnie sounded concerned, like she stopped mid-sentence, but Jason wasn’t sure, as he’d been too busy focusing on the growing tension between his eyebrows along his forehead and thinking of his father. He nodded instead of saying anything, watching the puffs of air come out irregular from his nostrils.

“Then don’t hog the hash man,” Ben reached over and snatched the blunt from Jason’s fingertips. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Jason almost laughed. Just another one of those things they could do together, haha. Notice the sky was blue, point out the grass was green, make a joke about his dead gay Jewish father. He didn’t make a joke about it, but he could if he wanted to.

“I just,” he bit his lower lip in the way his mother usually scolded him for, when suddenly: _click_. “I just had an idea. For my senior project.”

* * *

When Jason was four years old, he wanted to be just like his father. His father was funny, his father didn’t talk to him like he was a baby. He could ask questions about anything and his father would answer them. He could sit on his father’s shoulders and see the whole world from up there. What’s the most beautiful thing in the world? Love, love is the most beautiful thing in the world.

When Jason was ten years old, he truly would’ve rather died violently than turn out anything like his father. He also probably would’ve found a fancy five-cent word to describe how deeply and painfully he refused to be like his father, because he was at that age where showing off how smart he was was fun for him. In fact, it was the only fun he was having at the time, because he hated the world and his parents were divorcing and his mother was miserable and his father hadn’t answered questions Jason didn’t think he had to ask and what if Jason was also gay and bound to ruin everything?

When Jason was sixteen years old, he spends a few months calling his father “Marvin” to his face, just to get a rise out of him. Hi Marvin. Hey Marvin. My week was good, Marvin, how was your’s? It was funny, finding small ways to poke fun at his father, even if not a lot was getting a rise out of him at that point. He’d mellowed out a lot, they both had. They both had to, especially when they weren’t sure what could happen tomorrow, the next day, the day after. The only thing anyone reprimands Jason for at this age is calling his father “Marvin”, and Jason made sure to keep it that way.

Jason turned twenty-two years old, a mere few weeks ago, blowing the candles out on a homemade cake with his mother and step-father and absolutely ancient dog. He doesn’t make a wish. He’s graduating in the spring with high honors, two majors. He’d been interviewing with law schools and they had gone swimmingly. He’d been working on his photography portfolio and earned high praise from his professors. He liked his friends. He liked his shitty apartment. He liked the steady and stressful and boring in and out of his daily life and taking pictures of it when he could. Jason had grown up. He didn’t need a wish. He doesn’t believe in that anyway.

* * *

It started with a letter.  Ben dumped it on the table that Friday morning like he had with all the others—more than normal because  apparently  all three of them had been too tired to  be bothered  with things like getting the mail for a few days in a row.  Jason himself  probably  wouldn’t even have had the energy to go through the pile if Ben hadn’t said there was something in there for him, that it looked important.

 

 

Munching  mindlessly  on a spoonful of Captain Crunch, Jason thumbed through stacks and stacks of magazines and coupons and bills before hitting a heavy white envelope. A heavy white envelope addressed to him. A heavy white envelope addressed to him from Columbia Law School.

Now why would he have—oh.

_Oh._

Jason had  nearly  choked on his spoon, fumbling to rip it open, his heart stopping, the world freezing, until—

There it was, clear as day.

_Dear Mr. Kushner, I am delighted to share that you have been accepted  to Columbia Law School for the 1991-1992 academic year._

Many hours later, Jason couldn’t help but glaze over it as he shuffled through the scattered papers and mail and clutter that lay on their kitchen table (or rather, what they had of a kitchen table, under all this junk).  He’d thought he was gonna have a heart attack reading it over and over and for the rest of his day, mismatching his clothes, being late to his first class, forgetting to call his mother and tell her about it.  Well, that wasn’t fair, Jason was far from a negligent son, as it was what he was thinking about—whether he should call her or tell her about it in person—when he stumbled into his senior photography seminar right on the dot,  just  as Professor Fraser went to close the door.

“Nice of you to join us, Jason,” Fraser had snarled through a thick mustache that made him look a little like a walrus with his bald head.  Jason knew rendering such an attitude before noon meant he was Fraser’s favorite student, and didn’t say anything as he  practically  vibrated to his seat.

It was a shortened class—Fraser had said he had other important obligations to tend to, but Jason knew that  really  meant he didn’t want to be teaching on a Friday.  The class  was dedicated, instead, to dissecting, not  just  any, but The Senior Project, and picking time slots for the following week to meet with Fraser and go over direction and sample shots and progress.

Fraser looked straight at Jason,  practically  spitting the over-pronounced consonants in “DirecTion” and “SamPle ShoTs” and “ProgreSS”. The love was palpable,  just  send him roses next time, Professor Fraser.

He realized he’d shuffled over the paper he was looking for at least three times in the attempt to look for it: the typed-up assignment sheet, a little crumpled and a little coffee-stained, listing the details and written addendums of The Senior Project requirements.

Admittedly, Jason had  been warned  of this project at the beginning of the semester, he’d  just  been a little tied up with other things (like getting into Columbia Law—  just  little things, you know). Tied up long enough for the first deadline to roll around right under his nose, with nothing to show for it.

“This project,” Fraser spat, turning what could’ve been a five minute lecture into twenty minutes, “is the cornerstone of all you have learned as artists and technicians.  It represents everything you can do, everything you are as a student, the potential you could have in the future, your place in the world as a documentarian of its wonder.”

It was all schmaltz and drama, but The Senior Project was not notorious for no reason.  Seniors with the great portfolios, papers, and displays at the senior showcase got offers for jobs pretty  instantaneously  ; seniors with the best portfolios, papers, and displays got to show their work at the much shinier and prestigious staff showcase, their work  being presented  to the most influential creative colleagues the realm of photography had to offer.  It was all a big deal, a big life-changing deal, big enough that more than a few seniors every year sorta kinda lost their minds over this assignment, but who was counting?

Jason? Jason usually kept himself sane by  just  enjoying the challenge.  Take the shot, miss the shot, it all happened in the blink of an eye, and  frankly, too  quickly  for every shot to be profound, but hell if he wasn’t going to try.

“Your status quo will not be good enough,” Fraser had started somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark . “Let it be something you don’t quite understand, something you may never understand. Let it speak for itself, let it test you in concepts beyond what you have ever done before. Politics. God. Art. Pain. Love. Everything. Nothing.

 

 

Drama, drama, drama. What Fraser was skating around was the actual challenge of it all.  The focal point of the project had to be a photo not taken by the student, and the rest of the work had to fit around the style, mood, and theme of the original image.  Hence where the melodramatic psychotic breaks tended to occur—he couldn’t  just  show up with his typical action shots from the sports section of the student paper, or pictures of trees, or photos of architecture, lest he submit himself to ruthless scrutiny, or worse, a C. No, he needed an image to study and a style to emulate and worse, a plan.

Jason tapped his fingers on the table, reading his notes in the margin over and over, but now with the addition of his cross-looking father watching from his subconscious— _something I don’t understand_ _? Something I don’t understand._ Not understanding was something Jason didn’t understand,  frankly.  While he  intently  kept it compartmentalized on opposite end of his cognition, the political science realm of Jason’s brain (or rather, the ego, the intellect, the rationalizing, what have you)  was perplexed  at the notion of not knowing exactly everything about everything.  There was always more to learn, he had not problem  freely  admitting, but nothing he couldn’t understand.

He’d plodded over the idea over and over, throwing it in a blender with the Columbia letter so he could obsess over them both  simultaneously, until he decided to give up and hang out with his roommates. Until until Marnie reminded him of—

“He’s not even listening. You broke him, Marn.”

“I can’t tell if he’s having a stroke of genius or having a stroke.”

“Mmm?”  Jason blinked back to reality, realizing his friends had taken seats on the opposite side of the table, closed the window to the fire escape, started making rice on the stove. They'd known each other long enough to know what one another were like when they were busy being ambitious young students at one of the best schools in the world. Ben could buckle down and focus with surgeon-like precision, but only when he was down to the wire. Marnie needed to be on her feet when she was writing. And Jason, well...

“You’re doing that thing again," Ben said. "Like this building could be on fire right now and you would still be standing there looking at the table. It's been like, five whole minutes, dude."

"You said you had an idea for your senior project and then ran inside like you saw a bomb raid in the sky,” said Marnie. “You wanna spill the idea, or…?”

 Well, he would if he could. But where could he even start?

Jason felt his mouth open like he was preparing an answer, but the only thing that filled the dead air was boiling water on a stove older than all three of them, and Ben getting up to get cooking. Getting up and stepping across old, cracked tiles that changed somewhere into old, rickety wood in need of a varnish cornering at old, cracked plaster walls.  Jason knew every inch of this place and could lay it out like a chess board in his head, moving from the rip under the second burgundy couch cushion to the rip in the Talking Heads poster on the far wall by the floor lamp. It was an apartment as small as it was old, after all, but every chess board was the same, and Jason had clocked a lot of hours playing chess against his dad, against himself. Even when the board now extended from the typical square main board into bathrooms, bedrooms; Marnie had walled off the hole-in-the-wall storage closet with curtains to make room for her bed, Ben and Jason were sharing the postage stamp room, the line in the sand being where the photographs began and ended—

“The Wall,” Jason muttered,  effectively  to himself only, before retreating into his bedroom and leaving his roommates to scratch their heads and burn their rice.

The Wall was in reference to a bit of a statement piece all photography students had, here on the far side of Jason’s room, or rather, Jason's corner of the room. It was covered, every inch, in all the photos Jason was proudest of taking or otherwise liked the best. He’d had clippings of his photos the student paper had published, the pitcher mid-throw or the football team after an unforeseen victory. He’d had photos printed from school projects, meticulously planned out and shot and printed, hours spent in the photo lab inhaling absolutely healthy chemicals until he got it just right. He’d had just polaroids too, of his friends, of trips to Coney Island and concerts and parties and ball games, snapshots of nameless moments, effortless and shiny. Some of the photos he didn’t take, namely all the photos he had hung up of him and his family. There’s only seven, Jason counts. He wonders if that’s too few, or too many, what it would look like to an onlooker, for a 22-year-old to have photos of his mother up in the same place he tried to bring back girls, or for a 22-year-old to have more polaroids of his friends day-drinking at the beach than his lesbian godmothers, or his step-father, or his Whizzer.

There were four photos of his father on his wall, and Jason had to hand it to himself that it was more than he would’ve estimated. Naturally, none of them were quite what he was looking for.

He couldn’t use the one from his high school graduation, with Mendel and Mom and Dad and The Lesbians, because the flash was giving them all red-eyes, and his dad was frankly too withered in this photo to be forced into the role of carrying his entire senior project. He couldn’t use the one of him and his father from Thanksgiving 1972, because there was no way Jason could recreate the unbridled joy of doing something you knew you weren’t supposed to do (smash your hands straight into the mashed potatoes) or watching the son you held in your lap do something you kind of always wanted to do but weren’t supposed to do (smash your hands straight into the mashed potatoes, make sure it squishes in between your fingers) (Jason wondered if he could find another photo of his father looking quite that happy). He wouldn’t use the one from his bar mitzvah, on the off chance something happened to it and he didn’t get it back. He just wouldn’t use the one of him, his father, and Whizzer, at Central Park one day, right when the leaves had begun to turn. No, that was his.

Well. Shit.

"What was that for?" asked Marnie from the doorway, mouth full, two bowls of rice in hand. She stood beside him, standing on her tip-toes, like she was trying to analyze the wall like he was. 

"I'm looking for a good photo of my dad," Jason answered, simply, now having found his speaking voice again.. 

"For your senior project?"

Jason nodded, taking the bowl of rice without taking his gaze off the photos in front of him. Graduation. 1972. Bar Mitzvah. Central Park. Graduation. 1972. Bar Mitzvah. Central Park. Weird to think that in the time Jason had lived in this apartment, these photos were all he'd seen of his father. 

He was standing up on top of his bed before he knew it, careful not to hit his head against the ceiling, aiming for a better view. There had to be something he was forgetting, there always was, when he was much younger and scrutinizing their old black-and-white board while his father looked onward, arms crossed and winning. 

"Let me get this straight, I share with you my innermost thoughts and feelings about being out in the world after college, and it inspires you to? Use a photo of your father as the baseline for your senior project?"

"Yeah, sounds about right," Jason answered, taking a forkful of rice, twiddling the fork between his fingers as he chewed.

"Should I be honored?" Marnie called to Ben.

Ben came up behind her to watch the spectacle, little pieces of rice stuck in his dark brown beard, only to take one look at Jason being a lunatic (being _himself_ , thanks) and shrug. "That's one way to look at it."

That's one way to look at it, his dad would probably say, as he touched a pawn, a knight, a bishop. That's one way to look at it. 

Jason dropped his fork, watching it fall from high above his bed to clatter and slide across the floor below. 

"It went under the bed," Marnie pointed, taking his bowl for him as Jason started getting down carefully, "if you can hear me."

"I can hear you fine, I'm just really foc—" 

Another way to look at it. 

Jason blinked, before scrambling onto his stomach to reach out and grab the cardboard box sitting under the far end of his bed frame. It took getting on his hands and knees and looking upside down—past dust bunnies and dirty socks—to even see it. He hadn't forgotten about it, as if he could ever forget about it, but he'd been so busy. Going, going, going, going, out of sight, out of mind, right? 

Jason blew dust off the box before opening it to find with Whizzer's old camera, the one he'd gifted Jason post-mortem, sitting simply in a pile of old film rolls. 

"Ooh, he found something," Ben whispered to Marnie, like they were explorers in the wild stumbling upon a great beast. 

"It's just—" Just? Jason, come on, he could practically hear Whizzer say, this is _O_ _ld Faithful_ , "a camera, and some old film. I kinda forgot I even had it, but I think I'll find some more pictures of my dad in here."

It was a warm familiarity, holding Whizzer’s camera in the palm of his hands like he had when they were smaller and less worn, for years and years before he’d started needing something newer and higher quality for school. But this thing, this Old Faithful had been his refuge for years, like he could point-and-shoot his problems away, point-and-shoot the sky blue. He wondered how well it still worked. He wondered if they’d even sell film for a camera this old anymore.

Suddenly energized, Jason snapped a quick photo of his roommates, staring at him from above, eating rice and looking judgmental.

"Get some sleep tonight, please?" Jason never slept well. 

"Yeah, of course, I'll try." His roommates may have found it easy to take their mind off things and pass out like logs for upwards of twelve hours, but that'd never been Jason, and that wasn't about to start tonight. 

Jason took the box into the living room, just to be polite about it.

See, he’d been a fussy baby, up at all hours of the night, maybe as some kind of penance for his young parents’ sins, except they were Jewish and suffering was meant to be part of their lifeblood anyway. He was an even fussier toddler, crawling into his parents’ bed after bolting awake at the slightest creak in the house, or because he was bored, or because he missed them, or just because. After starting regular school, he slept better, but the bed-wetting started; around the time they found out his father was not just having an affair like every other thirty-something man who’d been meant to grow up before they were ready, but having an affair with a man, Jason had developed a slight bout of insomnia. His mother called it slight, but even she didn’t know the hours he’d spent playing chess alone downstairs in the parlor because he could not quell his thoughts long enough to relax, let alone sleep well. This continued on and off until college, where Jason had totally destroyed any semblance of a regular sleep cycle and slept best after chugging a cup of coffee or two, which was completely healthy, he was sure.

Jason, in his heart, liked to claim that one neurosis of his, insomnia, as his own, and not as a result from his parents or traumatic life events. It was nice, after everything he’d experienced so far, to have one thing that was all on him. He just wouldn’t sleep. His brain was so smart and so fast but it couldn’t just, shut _the hell_ up long enough to relax. And it would stay that way, and Jason would keep it.

He’d keep it for nights like tonight, nights where he’d had an idea and he was gonna stick to it. Knowing himself, and if he was lucky, he’d manage to get his head on a pillow between four and five in the morning after making enough progress or enough of a plan to relinquish control until he came back to consciousness. Maybe it wasn't as economical as a checkmate in two moves, but a win was a win. 

* * *

There was a part of Jason, despite being closer to six feet tall than five and not having rocket ship bed sheets anymore, that was still angry too. It was a small part—he'd mellowed out a lot, if you recalled—that was still sitting at the first seder after the divorce, arms crossed and in a dress shirt that was too big for him and had been so for two years now. And he'd been precocious and ferocious but still his parents' sweet baby boy, but then Jason turned 10 and his father had left home only to bring his _friend_  and the damn Seder plate for Passover as if he hadn't just left his own personal Egypt. And Jason was sure he was too damn old for whatever the hell was going on in his dining room, but still young enough to respond with anything other than poison on the tongue. He was good at that, he'd learned from the best, that green version of his dad uncouth, insane, that was was there with him then, there with him now.

His father could offend, cause a stink, fine, so could Jason. So _would_ Jason. 

Jason, before he knew better, had been the kind of kid to do, say things just to see what would happen. He'd caused a couple headaches in his day, but when it was intentional, it'd been in the name of science, wasn't it? Sneaking away to down two of the four glasses of wine set aside for the Maggid before his parents or Whizzer or Mendel, who was here for _some_ reason, would notice. Most things just happened around Jason, out of sight, out of mind, as much as his parents could control that, but it was Passover and Passover meant freedom. And a warm belly, and a fuzzy mouth, apparently. It took every atom in his body to stay upright, but he was hardly the biggest star in tonight's sky, judging by the way every adult in the room danced around each other.

"Jason, are you ready to start the Four Questions?" his mother had asked, not quite looking as distressed as she was, going into the kitchen to grab the glasses for the whole process. 

"Four Questions?" Jason had slurred, feeling himself blow his own cover. "More like four Jews in a room _bitching_."

Every set of eyes in the room whipped to bore into him now, and not his mother returning with the two empty glasses Jason had finished off all on his own and a jaw on the floor. 

Jason had burped, and grabbed the wine glass in the middle left for Elijah and took a drink from that too. Bring in the prophet, save them from slavery! Mendel's eyes had gone wide and rigid, Whizzer had tried to suppress a laugh, his mother had tried to suppress her tears, but his father, oh that green and bitter version his father, looked at him with recognition, as Jason stared him in the eye right back. They were a mirror. 

_What's it to you?_ asked the wicked son from directly across the table.

But Jason was a good boy at heart, and a much more reverent son now, with more life experiences to sit in for the rest of eternity that made him a bit kinder these days, if not more controlled, less ignorant. That'd happened to his dad too, he believed, as he'd also eventually mellowed out. And Jason didn't believe in ghosts or angels or spirits watching him from above, nor did he get any dream visit from his father after he died, but there were other versions of his father that sat with him too. Ones besides anger, to be fair. Ones that wiped his tears when he fell off the swings and praised him for getting good grades and came to his baseball games even though he was a shit player and sat in a hospital bed, trying not to die, for his sake. It was just weird to think, well, that he hadn't been thinking about it this whole time. That he'd packed up his father in a cardboard box and taken him with him without much thought. Of course, out of sight, out of mind, right?

Don't be mistaken, Jason loved his father, more than he loved most people on this Earth. He just had a lot of work to do.


	2. nothing is for nothing, a new land is a new land to explore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this just an elaborate Fun Home AU? Mayhaps...
> 
> Didn't mention all the chapter titles would also be from the song "Set Those Sails" from In Trousers, which you should all listen to if you already haven't because it absolutely slaps even if you need to listen to it 10 times before you understand. 
> 
> Bill Finn: In Trousers isn't really explicitly canon it's more of an impressionistic painting  
> Me: So you mean I can pick and choose exactly which characterizations from In Trousers that I want to keep for this fic huh?  
> Bill Finn: What
> 
> My computer fuckin went caput in the middle of last week which delayed the chapter posting quite a bit. I have a good deal of the story already written, it just needs better flow, connection, etc, so the rest of the updates shouldn't come out with weeks in between. 
> 
> I forgot to shamelessly plug my tumblr, symphonyin-c.tumblr.com, which I rarely actually use for anything real but like, idk, if you're into that sort of thing.
> 
> Also big thanks for the kind comments so far, I do my best and I'm glad to provide something interesting for fans of this lovely show!!! Know that I'm working up the nerve to reply to you all!!! Thank you!!

There had been a pattern there, and Jason liked patterns (at least in theory, he was never so organized). Just like the ocean, there was an ebb and flow—melancholic and emotional absence in, manic fits of everything and anything out, and somewhere in perfect balance, just Dad. Now if his father was keen on anything (theoretically), it was a good pattern, a strict routine, a more consistent norm than the shoreline could ever give, over the ebb and flow things like moods, or feelings, or whims. Jason was young when his father started therapy, young enough that when he was told “your father is going to see a special doctor”, Jason’s imagination concocted something more like a sea scientist, someone with wild white hair who conducted experiments with beakers and test tubes and gemstones inside a boat on the Atlantic, like a pirate but in a white coat. Imagine his surprise when, instead of coming home smelling like sea salt with buried treasure and a bubbling potion in hand, his father came home with a bottle of pills that Jason wasn’t even allowed to touch. Jason’s grandmother, Marvin’s mother, would eventually run her mouth a bit too long on the phone one day, when Jason told her why his father couldn’t come to the phone right now. She would let loose, like it was the most obvious fact in the world, that he was seeing a psychiatrist (a word Jason still didn’t understand), you know, for crazy people (a concept Jason did in fact understand).

Since Grandma Rhoda never seemed to let him get a word in and dictionaries were only so helpful when you yourself were just learning how to read, Jason asked his father to clarify, one Saturday afternoon in the car, a few things that were clouding his understanding.

“Dad, when you go to the special doctor, are you seeing a psychiatrist?” Jason was so young, he could hardly even pronounce “psychiatrist”, every syllable forcing an effort from his teeth and mouth and memory.

His father hadn’t responded to him right away as he usually would, but hadn’t tensed up either as he made a steady right on the corner, and with some thought, gave it a shrug and answered, “Yeah kid, I am.”

A kid so young, that his feet couldn’t even rest comfortable on the bottom floor of the car. He kicked the air instead. “Are psychiatrists for crazy people?”

“Only sometimes. Crazy people or people with a lot of money.”

So young, that it hadn’t even occurred to Jason that his father might be abnormal. That no matter what he did, he was just, well, Dad, and that was that. “Which one are you?”

His father had not hesitated this time. “Both," he replied.

* * *

 

Whatever, Ben could tease him as much as he wanted. Jason didn’t work to graduate with two majors within the usual four years by taking days off. He had a spare key to the darkroom on campus, why _not_ use it when everyone was still too hungover to even consider getting ahead on a Saturday?

Jason had woken up on the cold hardwood floor just after nine, a blanket haphazardly thrown onto him (the living room lampshade placed on his head—very clever), when he was clearly knee deep in going through film rolls. He’d spent the night squinting, gingerly spreading out each carefully contained negative to the bare lightbulb of the lamp to see what they’d been developed into, as well as keeping safe from extraneous damage the rolls that had yet to see the light of day. It’d been a labor, but a labor of love, Jason’s curiosity for what the next roll contained superseding his exhaustion.

Ten years. Next year would be ten years since Whizzer died. It wasn’t something that gave him a lump in his throat anymore, but sometimes he still found himself wishing Whizzer was here. Just during small moments, for quick visits, just to talk to him. What’d started as a way to rebel against his parents had accidentally stuck for good, but Whizzer, whether he knew it or not, was pre-pubescent Jason’s absolute image of _cool_. Effortless, sharp, shiny. Something was only as worthwhile as Whizzer saw it, as far as Jason had been concerned. He knew better now, but sometimes he wondered what Whizzer would’ve thought about, say, the Yankees’ line-up one season, or if he actually thought Labyrinth was a good movie, or just liked that David Bowie was in it. What he thought about Jason choosing NYU over Brown, or his friends, or his shit apartment.

Or what he thought about Jason’s secret cassette tape collection, which he kept because he happened to work best when he was listening to diva bubblegum pop in the darkroom. Although, if he had to venture, Whizzer probably would’ve liked Madonna a lot.

Never mind it though, now, he had to hand it to Whizzer—not only were his rolls well-kept, sans any damage that time and storage had done, but he had a natural sense of composition and scene. Even his blurry shots had some wicked sense of balance and complimentary color, space and focus. Jason wasn’t quite sure exactly how much formal training he’d had, but it was clear, from the way each roll of film had been carefully stored to the content of the film itself—Whizzer had been meticulous and effortful and a damn good photographer.

On the counter to his left, were the rolls he couldn’t use. Not that they were bad, if they weren’t at all damaged, just not at all what he was looking for. Rolls full of skylines, of Manhattan’s man-made majesty from above, or from straight on, the light making windows and bricks look hand-painted. Rolls of drag shows and laughing men in dark red lipstick, blurred over from dance and revelry. There was one reel of just the rolling plains of the Midwest, of old cars and corn stalks. One of Whizzer, looking much, much younger, testing the camera in the mirror, just a flash and a pair of skinny legs. There was another reel of Whizzer and his dad that he had to squint at to even make out the content o—oh Jesus. Was that a butt? Oh no. Jason nearly threw that reel across the room. Nope. No. _Jesus_.

Not that kind of project.

To his right, were the rolls Jason liked and considered printable, even if he wasn’t planning on using them for his senior project. Like the time they’d all gone whale-watching with the Lesbians over the summer; Jason knew Cordelia’s and Charlotte’s anniversary was coming up, and he thought the shot of them laughing in those big dumb ponchos, getting splayed with mist off the ocean waves would be a nice gift. There was a reel of the top of Dad’s old building, where Jason had spent his weekends before his dad passed and the Lesbians moved; Jason liked how he recognized the view even now, the tops of the surrounding buildings and the way he could see the Hudson through the skyscrapers.

Hold on, here was a good one. A good one of his father, finally. A _really_ good one of his father, in fact, hold on...

Jason was here for this roll, it was his first weekend back at his dad’s with Whizzer moved back in. Whizzer’s stuff was still in the few boxes scattered around the apartment, and him being how he was, let Jason have free reign of a moderately sized, very beat-up “knick-knack” box—“You know, for all the shit that’s kind of useless but you’d be upset if anyone else besides you had it?” (His dad, in the next room: “don’t swear in front of my kid”) Of course, there had been some cool shit in that box—baseball cards and comics and magazines old enough to be relics, tennis balls and golf tees and cassettes and a whole old-school film camera.

“Oh, I forgot that’s where I packed that,” Whizzer had smiled, asking before taking it by the worn leather strap and showing Jason himself—this is where he told Jason he’d done portraits, some freelance, some for families in some nameless department store, just to earn some extra cash. He’d learned a lot, if Jason ever wanted to give it a whirl, Whizzer would happily show him the ropes.

“Really?” Jason had practically glowed.

“Yeah, of course. In fact,” Whizzer wasn’t looking at him, he was looking at his father across the living room, taking a boxcutter to a cardboard container containing what looked like even more clothes. “Let’s start lesson number one right _now_.”

He’d gone over a few little things that Jason knew like the back of his hand now: have the subject face the source of light, be mindful of your background and frame, long lens flatten the features, and so on. But when his dad got up to carry the box into his bedroom, Whizzer leaned down close and whispered like they had a secret to share. “You wanna know the absolute best way to get someone to look their absolute best for a portrait?”

Jason nodded, watching Whizzer squat down on one knee, peering through his camera like he was looking down the barrel of a gun, like they were action heroes or cowboys and not, uh, nerds.

“You gotta get ‘em laughing,” said Whizzer, before turning his voice nonchalant, calling “Hey Marv? Could you come here a sec?”

His father emerged, leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, looking cross. Not that he was cross at that present moment, that was just his face, just how it looked, how Jason knew it to look those days. It was around this time that his father stopped looking his age and started looking old, or at least, more creased and washed out.

“What are you two doing?” he’d asked, at least a little bemused at whatever ridiculousness Whizzer and Jason looked from across the floor, on their knees, holding their breath on him for some reason.

“You, uhhh, wouldn’t happen to have a band-aid, would you?” Whizzer asked, camera up to his eye, in that tone that was as easy-going as it was hiding something.

Dad didn’t crack, never. He just raised one eyebrow, huffed, bit the inside of his cheek. “What do you need a band-aid for, Whizzer?”

“You see, I think I’ve scraped my knee falling for you.”

It wasn’t an immediate break, a slow smirk, then gums, then a full smile and a light laugh— _click_. Whizzer got the photo: Jason’s father, from about the waist up, arms folded, smiling brightly at the ground, leaning against the doorway in the golden hour light streaming through the window, nothing but a sea of black behind him.

He was glowing. Really glowing. Just beaming, Jason thought then, and thought now too.

It was a damn near perfect photo, maybe even perfect enough to use for the project. He had to print it, even if he didn’t use it because, well. Well? It was hard to describe, sitting with it now in the dark, but it was nice to have.

There was something familiar in Jason’s chest that he couldn’t place, now at twenty-two years old, that he wanted to keep.

“That was _so bad_ ,” is what Jason had said at twelve, of course.

“We’ll have to wait to get it developed, but that’s how it’s done, kid,” Whizzer said, rising to his feet, speaking in reference to Jason but instead still looking at his father. It was exactly as sweet as it was absolutely nauseating.  Jason could have gagged, ruined the moment, but he didn’t, and he wouldn’t have meant it anyway. Looking back on it, Whizzer was probably a little bit more of a dork than Jason gave him credit for. He only ever told dumb jokes and was afraid of spiders. And he’d been into someone like his _dad_ , after all. Whizzer could only give him so many old school cameras and carefully vintage leather jackets (two, that Jason was finally big enough to wear, mind you) to make up for being so grossly in love with someone who looked and acted like a _Marvin_.

After the moment that particular shot was taken, thought, the camera was put away and they went on with their day, his dad prodding another box at him with a _“hey kid, get to work”_. But the roll of film went on, Jason noticed, to another day, another Kushner to photograph. Only this time, the subject was—Jason slid the reel under the enlarger, just to make sure—well, _him_.

Yep, three in a row, that was Jason. Twelve-year-old Jason, all messy hair and skinny arms, sitting at the dining room table at his father’s apartment, working at something with a pencil and immense inspection. In the first photo, his tongue was sticking out, he was so focused, intense, perplexed. In the second, he’d sat up straighter, face still intense and commanding, like he could will his pencil, his hand, whatever was on the paper, to happen how he wanted or needed it to. And then the last one, _wow_ , light sank through the windows and drapes and caught in Jason’s hair and along his cheeks as he looked outside, calm and relaxed. They were simple shots, sure, but masterfully taken, and right under his nose too. Jason wondered if Whizzer got to know how lovely they turned out. Jason wondered if this was how Whizzer saw him, as beautiful as Jason saw him.

He made two copies of the one of him looking out the window. One for himself, to hold onto, and one for his mother, because he knew when he showed it to her tonight at dinner, she would ask for a copy.

 _“Like A Prayer”_ was on when Jason heard footsteps coming down the hall; he quickly turned off the radio on the off chance they popped in to ask why someone was in here working on a Saturday.

* * *

Saturday nights were for trekking out of Greenwich over to Brooklyn for dinner at his mom and step-dad’s house, period, end of story. They’d moved it to Saturday from the staple Friday night dinners that colored his adolescence, because? Of his changing schedule and availability as a student? Their collective and desperate need for a change? Nope, because of _shabbat,_ his mother had told him, even though he knew neither her nor Mendel were the strictest of observers anyway. You’d think a mother and a psychiatrist could just tell their son they wanted to see him outright, but instead Jason himself inferred, stayed in New York for college, and went home once a week for a home-cooked meal to quell whatever anxieties his mom and step-dad had about him being “out there, in the real world, growing up”.

He quietly felt that it was the least he could do for her, for the both of them, frankly.

It was just a half hour on the subway too, a route he knew simple and easy after the world didn’t seem so big, after four years of making the commute. This week in his camera bag, alongside the Tupperware he always meant to return to his mother but always wound up filling up with more food to take back to school, was Whizzer’s camera, the few photos Jason had printed this morning at school, and thankfully, film. His regular camera shop, lo and behold, had two rolls of the exact type of film he needed for this incredibly old Old Faithful, with about 16 shots per roll. In combination with the leftover film Whizzer had left, Jason now had 39 shots to make this project work if this was the direction he wanted take. It could be a technical triumph, but he couldn’t think about it too hard, and he definitely couldn’t think about all the times he burned through, easily, more than 50 shots in one session on a digital camera.

Professor Fraser’s words echoed in somewhere in the depths of his consciousness as he watched the city he knew well slip and slide past the window. _Politics. God. Art. Pain. Love. Everything. Nothing._ He was still, to put it frankly, a little aimless. So he’d found one (count ‘em, _one_ ) nice photo of his father, great, he’d found quality film to use, swell, now what exactly was he going to take photographs _of_? He needed another step to jump to, another blink-and-miss-it moment, or at the very least, someone to bounce ideas off of, to help him understand the subject.

Jason was at the front door of his childhood home before he knew it, jogging up the familiar stoop and ringing the doorbell that sounded like chimes. Shoving his cold hands in his pockets, he realized he’d nearly forgotten that he’d folded his acceptance letter from Columbia into his coat before dashing out of the apartment and heading for the train. He then realized he’d nearly forgotten, in the rush of the last twenty-four hours, that he’d gotten into Columbia. Shivering from the bitter, frigid conditions that had defined this winter so far, he tried to shake it off, telling himself that the novelty had just worn off, that was all. That was totally it.

Once Mom saw it, surely, it’d be exciting again.

The door flew open to greet Jason with a wall of meatloaf-and-cinnamon scented warmth, the dog wobbling (as fast as he could, now that he was nearly fourteen) to nudge and bark at his feet. “You know,” said Jason's mother, standing in the light of the entryway, pulling him into a tight hug that was all earth tones and soft knit, “you don’t have to ring the doorbell to get into your own home.”

“I thought I’d be polite,” he laughed, the two of them stepping inside and shutting the cold out behind him.

The old brick house had been redecorated and renovated over the years, but it was not so unrecognizably different, Jason thought. The floorboard right in front of the stairs still squeaked, the air by the chimney still ran cold, the crack in the plaster on the ceiling in the den would probably never get fixed. They could take out the ugly green shag carpet, paint the walls blue, bring in Mendel’s unruly and overgrown plant collection, hang up Jason’s best photography, whatever, but it didn’t stop feeling a certain way Jason couldn’t place as anything other than than "home". The air was the same, it _smelled_ the same, in a weird way, and it wasn’t because of their ancient dachshund.

Bobby Fischer (the dachshund in question) liked to throw all his weight on Jason’s feet until he was picked up and held like a baby. Jason obliged, _this_ time, if only to kick off his sneakers at the door, but it didn’t mean he was happy about it. Another thing that hadn’t changed with the time: Jason and Bobby were not friends.

“Hi Jason! Welcome home!” called Mendel from the kitchen, which meant dinner was either going to be deeply and awfully average, but who could fault the man for his efforts? He had not changed so much either, even as he’d literally and figuratively changed the house. Mendel had started going grey a smidge prematurely, his ugly sweater collection only expanding. He might’ve shrunk some, but neither of them were sure if it was him getting shorter or Jason getting taller. Mendel had always been something of a sunny guy, but married life had treated him exactly as well as he treated Jason’s mother, which was very well, if a bit? Ridiculous? Overwhelming? He was still a bit _much_ , but Jason knew that when he (masterfully, brilliantly, wisely) set them up in the first place. Being saccharine sweet was hardly a sin, being grossly romantic and absolutely joyful to be alive, even if Jason couldn’t relate, was surely not a crime. Being bad at his job was maybe not great, but Mendel wasn’t Jason’s psychiatrist anymore, he was his step-dad, and he was good at that, whatever it meant. Mendel was there for them, if sometimes with average cooking, and that was that.

“Can you believe this cold we’re getting? Here, let me take Bobby so you can take your coat off,” Mom reached out to Jason to grab and hold the dog in an all-too practiced fashion. She too had changed, albeit gradually, tip-toeing into happiness over time. She did her hair different now than she did when Jason was young, and her cheeks rounded out some, but she wore the same perfume as she always had, even when she wasn’t leaving the house, and she still reprimanded him, like she was now, for wearing sneakers in the snow. Once Jason went off to school and she grew comfortable with that, she’d finally got a chance to lean into the concept of adult life without children, foreign for someone who had the responsibility of parenthood dropped on her in college. If Jason couldn’t relate to Mendel’s baseline gratitude for even existing, then he could barely fathom the idea of being responsible for an actual baby at the age he was now, but Mom had done it, and now that he could wipe his own ass and get his own food, she could do all the fun things she’d been deprived of in her twenties. Day trips and book club and Pilates and wearing nice clothes and spending time with whoever it was she spent time with when he wasn’t home to dote over. Hell, Mom and Mendel were going to Hawaii in September, once Jason was situated and well-off and satisfactorily _alright_. That’d be cool, he supposed, and they were clearly excited about it, which was what counted.

It was less of a child-like need to be approved or satiated now that he was this old, but Jason mostly just wanted his mom to be happy. Even if he had to stop himself sometimes from being indignant or thoughtless with her, he wanted her to like her life. It didn’t seem like such a heavy thing to ask.

"I'm not going to keep buying you nice boots," she was shaking her head at him now, bouncing Bobby in her arms like he really was a baby, "if you're going to keep _forgetting_ to wear them."

“Hey, before I forget,” Jason said, careful to contain a smile as he pulled out the acceptance letter and unfolded it and held it up for her to see.

After a beat of squinting and confusion, Mom gave out something of a squeal, nearly dropping Bobby and pushing past the letter to crush Jason into another hug. She called for Mendel to get in here, her baby got into _law school_ , an _Ivy League_ school, was so smart and hardworking and she was so proud of him and and and. Mendel hadn’t wasted time coming to see what the fuss was, only to see the letter and hug Jason and his mother tightly as well, spilling congratulations like water from a spout. This was hardly unusual. In fact, such a bone-crushing love was why Jason was here every weekend to begin with. This was their house, this was their norm.

So you could imagine how apprehensive Jason might be about, say, pointing out the big dead gay Jewish elephant in the room.

He turned over in his head exactly how he was going to go about this as they went about their normal routine, setting the table, scooping (unseasoned) peas onto their plates, pouring water in tall, clear glasses, and taking their normal, practiced positions.

There were two possible outcomes:

Option 1: Jason reveals he is dedicating his senior project to his late father. His mother asks him if he is queer, and means to ask him why before her mind floods with repressed trauma. She has a breakdown, imagining her ex-husband stomping back into her house to ruin things one last time, while Mendel recommends him another therapist, some expert in some kind of new-fangled New Age-y bullshit because clearly nothing else has worked on him. Jason is now the crazy, potentially gay son who has made his mother cry.

Option 2: Jason reveals he is dedicating his senior project to his late father. Mom’s time with a (new, different, female, talented) psychiatrist did her well and she takes the news in stride, encourages him, even. Mendel is Mendel and tells him to follow his heart, or something. Jason leaves home knowing exactly how he was going to make 39 shots of film work as well as the secrets to the universe. No one cries or is even vaguely uncomfortable, Jason gets a full night of sleep.

Perhaps he was dramatizing it all a bit. Dad wasn’t a taboo topic, far from it. Jason didn’t have to actively convince himself of this as a truth; he was still here, in parts of this house, in parts of their lives, and was welcomed so, despite the mess that had once entailed. He was just, you know, _dead_. Most people found that to be something of a downer to recall. They’d brought him up periodically, in easy ways, like “this one time, your father—” and “Marvin used to—” and “Your dad had something like this—” and and and. Not big conversations. Not sad conversations. Not hard conversations. It was just, you know, his mother was a crier and his step-father had a strong incessant impulse to therapize and he wasn’t sure how much of their happiness was contingent upon not digging up Jason’s dead father and the good, the bad, and the ugly that had been buried with him. That was all.

Jason’s knee bounced when he thought too hard, but the red and orange plaid tablecloth probably hid that, huh? Dinner was over, the cinnamon coffee cake had been mostly eaten (thanks Mom, for at least vaguely understanding spices), and they were having coffee, he could blame it on that, if asked. He was getting worked up, _why_ was he getting worked up? He just needed to do it, and lay it out considerately, calmly. Jason wasn't some dumbass kid, there were ways to make this painless.

“Maybe we’ll have time to try pizza in Chicago during the layover,” said his mother.

“We can if you want, but I’m telling you, it’s more dough than it is anything else. Absolutely horrifying,” said Mendel.

“I need to talk to you about Dad,” said Jason, quickly feeling less like he’d made it easy and more like he had toppled his glass of water over and was watching the liquid cascade into a pool in the middle of the table.

With that, his mother and Mendel’s attention were snapped immediately on Jason and he watched them have their _click_ moment in real time. _Click click click click_ —a man, a woman, a son, and the ghost that still haunted parts of their home (the house he used to own, mind you) sitting at a happy meal together. Maybe he was being cynical about the whole thing, they hadn’t exactly rejected the sudden change in topic. Something in the way they looked at him was concentrating to not look as concerned as they might’ve looked just a few years prior, though. This effort to not immediately treat him like a scared and teary and crazy little boy, Jason didn’t know what to do with. He’d, maybe foolishly, expected them to be distressed on their own behalf, and not his behalf.

You think he’d know a bit better, honestly.

“Jason, are you alright?” Mendel asked after what seemed like the longest conversational pause of his life. Mendel reached his hand out over Jason’s. “If you’re having a hard time, you can tell us.”

Jason, taken aback, to put it simply, shook his head too quickly, ready to answer maybe a bit too soon, “I’m totally fine, I just—”

“I know senior year can be a stressful time—”

“—he’s the subject of my senior proj—”

“—but we’re here for you no matter what—”

“—and I just wanted to talk—"

He’d been well-trained; Jason could feel when his mom’s gaze became examining and analytical. Her two men maundering back and forth, she simply blinked at them, at Jason, before speaking.

“Mendel, dear,” his mother said suddenly to her husband, despite looking straight at Jason. “If you don’t mind.”

“Mind what?”

Mom motioned her head toward the door to the den.

Mendel pointed to himself.

Mom nodded.

“ _Oh_! Ah, okay, I understand! Of course, have a good chat, you two.” Jason watched him continue to babble as he stood up, clapped Jason on the back, and walked nearly backwards out of the room, watching the pair of them at the table concernedly. “If you need anything, I’ll be just a room away.”

When Mendel made it out the swinging kitchen door without tripping over himself, his mother stood up, smoothly and quietly making her way past the island counter toward the cabinets. They’d re-done the kitchen, Mom and Mendel, all by themselves recently to pull the space out of the seventies a little bit. Jason thought they did a good job, even if he still saw the flower-patterned wallpaper these walls used to have when he thought about home in his mind’s eye.

“You think he’d be able to read a room," Jason said.

“He just cares a lot,” his mother said simply. She pulled out two, old, mismatched mugs from the cupboards. “About everything.”

“I like that,” Jason conceded.

“I do too.”

Reaching for the kettle on the second shelf, Mom then paused, looking back at Jason, one eyebrow piqued. Jason watched her nod to herself, moving her hands from the kettle to the bottle of wine sitting on the counter rack and tried not to laugh when she poured out two glasses of wine into a commemorative MOMA mug and a Winnie the Pooh mug.

“Jason, your face is gonna get stuck like that, no need to pretend like your mother has never had a drink in her life,” she took a sip of her wine before handing Jason his, Pooh Bear first.

He took it with some caution, noting it’d been filled generously. “You know, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

“Oh, _this_ ,” she held up her wine mug, shaking her head, “isn’t for me, this is for you.”

“Mom, _why?_ ”

Because we don’t talk about him often anymore, Jason. In passing, when memory requires. Not out of hate or shame, but because no one watched you cope, Jason. “You just, brought this on suddenly, it made me think something happened. And you look tired.”

“I’ve been working a lot,” he replied, putting it mildly (as if anything could get past her, at this point), “It’s just for my senior seminar project.”

“You need to talk about your father?" she asked, short of incredulous, "For your _photography_ class?”

“Just go with it. I don’t really know where it’s going yet either.”

They both went in to take a sip of their wine at the same time. Dark and red and bitter, which told Jason she’d really actually poured this for him.

 “You’re sure you’re alright, sweetheart?” You cried when you found out and cried and the funeral and cried a few weeks later, Jason, over dinner on a Friday night where you said you missed him but did not expound and we did not press, Jason, because we heard you cry at night sometimes. We did not press, Jason, out of fear of your own delicate unraveling.

“Mom, I’m fine,” Jason assured her, doing his best to sound like a good, patient, not-at-all perplexed and completely well-rested son, “I promise. It’s for the project.”

Jason explained to her everything that had happened, from Fraser’s class, to talking to Marnie, to finding Whizzer’s camera, omitting details like working until four in the morning and smoking (Jason was close with his mother, close enough to know there were things she just didn’t need to know). As he spoke, she nodded and thought, nodded and thought, not breaking or distressing, just taking the information in in a way that made Jason think alright, maybe they could both walk away from this conversation without one of them crying about it. Good. Promising.

After a good few minutes of Jason rambling stream of consciousness style, with the long run-on sentences he was prone to using and not a lot of breaths in between, his mother blinked, took a sip of her wine, and said slowly “So all you’re doing is trying to understand everything and nothing, for one huge, colossal project. That’s all, huh?”

“Fraser loves the theatrics.”

“I can tell,” a beat, long enough to take a deep breath. Take a deep breath, Jason, “so what do you need me to do?”

“I,” Jason paused, to take that deep breath, remembering that, oh yeah, “don’t actually know.”

A smile, slow and less controlled than normal, spread across his mother’s face; this was what she did when she was laughing at him.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” she sat her mug down, getting ready to stand up, smoothing out her skirt with ease. “I have a box of some of your father’s old photos and such sitting upstairs in the attic that I’d been keeping case you wanted it one day.”

Ding, ding, ding! A winner!

“I can bring it down for you if you—”

“Oh my _God_ , that would be so helpful.”

And so Mom left the kitchen, squeezing his arm before and walking out the door, the off-swing letting Bobby back in to lay at Jason’s feet as she went. In the moments she left Jason to himself, with nothing but Bobby’s heavy breathing and the light laughter of the television in the next room, he’d minded his own, until he saw them, just out of the corner of his eye. They’d been there since they’d been cut out of the newspaper however many years ago, the two obituaries she kept off to the side of the fridge by the phone. Still. After all these years. Jason had seen them, walked past them enough times to know even from over here what they looked like in their photos. To know Whizzer’s picture had been one taken of him at Central Park, the same day as the one that Jason had hung up of them together in his room. To know, especially in his obituary photo, how obvious it was even in the black-and-white that Jason’s father had blue eyes. That the one thing that might tip someone off that they were actually two different people was that Jason had instead gotten his mother’s eyes, dark brown and a bit closer together.

Jason sometimes forgot his parents had once, you know, been married, and that Whizzer had been, to his mother, “the other woman”. Putting it so bluntly felt awkward and foreign and untrue somehow, but it’d all happened, hadn’t it? Jason’s bouncing knee picked up pace.

Mom had come back just as swiftly as she had left, with a dusty box only about as long and tall as her forearms, a rip in the corner and held together on top with duct tape. She was saying something, Jason was sure, as she set the box down on the near corner of the table, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the fridge.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked, absently.

Mom stopped, mid-sentence, “Of course.”

“Why do you keep their obituaries up?”

His mother tilted her head, lips parted and brows furrowed, like Jason had just asked her why she kept the windows closed during a rainstorm. “Well, why wouldn’t I?”

Well jeez, Mom, let’s recap. It’s not like anyone could blame you for, say, setting fire to the obituaries and leaving the ashes in the backyard. Or throwing them to the sea. Or keeping them on the mantle in the den where you found your husband fooling around with a friend of a friend who happened to be a man and also didn’t even like you. At least not at first, Mom, at least not until after the whole thing pigeon-holed you into a never-ending family dinner you shouldn’t have had to serve, playing mother for men who anyone else would have kicked out of the dining room. Men who somehow kept your love, made you love them, and then died too soon. That all _happened_.

“I just, I can see where you wouldn’t have wanted to keep them at all.” Like, come on Mom, maybe you cleared the air by the end of it all, maybe you and Dad had good times judging people together or stressing over Jason’s entire existence together, or whatever it was that brought you two together in the first place, but like. Come on. We don’t have to lie to ourselves. It wasn’t the happiest of marriages. It was a “if we can just push through” marriage. A partnership founded on trying to stay above water, except you both were the water and you both were drowning, somehow. There were times, Mom, when you would’ve let each other drown.

But nothing in his mother’s frame said drowning, and nothing in her eyes said fire.

“Jason,” crossing her arms into a wrap with her long, knit sweater, peering at him as if the answer was so, so simple and written right on her face. In fact, it was practically written right on her face. “I’d known your father for some twenty-odd years when he passed away. We didn’t keep that up for _nothing_. It’s not like we got married on accident.”

Jason bit his tongue, and dared not say that they got prodded into marriage because they were about to have a baby out of wedlock, lest he wanted to face his mother’s absolute wrath. Maybe it wasn’t fair to assume, or pick and choose the parts of his parents’ relationship that he wanted to remember or forget completely, but it seemed like a simple truth to him, simple enough that he didn’t have to dwell on it anymore: the sky was blue, the grass was green, and it would be understandable if his parents had divorced and never, never, never associated with one another ever again.

But they hadn’t done that. Jason had to secede that, and even now, his mother would not do that. And apparently, took insult to Jason suggesting otherwise. He felt sheepish.

“What about Whizzer?”

“Whizzer,” Mom sat on that one a bit, before loudly ripping a strip of dull grey duct tape off the top of the box. “Well, he was a good guy after all, I think. It was hard not to like someone like him, and every time I _tried_ —”another strip of duct tape, gone, at the hands of well-manicured, berry pink nails “I was reminded how much he loved you.”

Jason got up to grab her a pair of scissors, listening to her work through yet another old sticky strip of tape.

“And I’ve always been a bit soft…”

“Hmm?”

She was able to quietly get through the remaining restraints with a quick slice, blade to tape.

“…on people who clearly loved _you._ ”

“Oh.”

“It might’ve been complicated,” said his mother, just before sneezing from the faint cloud of dust. Jason handed her a napkin, “but I know how I feel.” She flipped open the four worn flaps of cardboard to reveal piles upon piles of photos and envelopes and books and papers. And that was that.

At the very top of the box was the stack of pictures that they’d hung up for Dad’s funeral, and at the very top of that stack, naturally, was Jason’s least favorite photo ever taken of himself, ever. His father insisted on keeping it, insisted on having it framed on the table by the front door of his apartment, no matter how many school pictures Jason would have taken of him after this one. It’d been his very first school photo and he’d been five years old, made of mostly curly brown hair more than anything else. His very first school photo, and when he was told to smile, straight frowned instead, looking nothing short of completely miserable.

Mom clearly shared the same opinion that Dad had, as she picked it up and laughed—not just giggled, but straight guffawed, holding the photo to look between kindergarten Jason and the real Jason, side by side.

“You _still_ make that face at me,” she said, wiping a tear out of the corner of her eye. The one tear, Jason had not anticipated making his mother cry like _this_.

“I don’t think I can use that one _…”_ he tried to say, quickly.

She cut him off. “We just thought this picture was _so funny_ ,” her constant stream of shoulder-shaking snickers was nearly contagious. Nearly.

Jason reached into the box and pulled out the next photo off the top before she could see him grin. What he’d grabbed was one of their family portraits, the same single photo both of his parents kept up even after the divorce, in small frames on their respective bookshelves. Jason was about nine, sitting between his mother on his left and his father on his right, a hand of theirs sitting on either one of his shoulders. They’d dressed up nice, and known better than to force Jason into a tie this time, for some dorky 45-minute session on a Saturday morning. It was nice, but that was about it. It’d been a hot day, and hot in the photo studio, and none of them wanted to be there, judging by those smiles. Of course, Jason was yet to find out exactly how much they each didn’t want to be there, but at the time, all he knew was that it was a hot and he felt like a display instead of a child and all this effort for a few dumb photos seemed pointless.

He’d come to know better on a few of those fronts.

“Ah, I still have this one,” said his mother, no longer laughing at him, reaching out to grab the photo for a better look. “We clean up pretty nice. It’s nice.”

Nice nice nice. And and and. A picture was worth a thousand words, and for some reason, they just kept using the same two, the other 998 swimming beneath the surface, not one of them able to capture the way they’d been then, and the way Jason’s mother was deferentially holding the picture now. Complicated, talk about complicated.

“Mom.”

“Hmm?”

“Can I ask you something?

“Of course.”

“Can I ask you anything?”

“Jason, of course.”

Jason glanced at the photo, studying its smiling subjects instead of thinking too hard about the dozens of questions he'd had buried in his consciousness, about the other 998 words. He was trying to understand and nice, and, nice, and, nice, and “Did you guys ever really love each other?”

Mom was not so cautious though, nor had the glaze in her eyes changed at all, and for a moment, Jason admired her for that.

“Yes,” she said, firmly. “I think so. Not really in a way the other one needed, I learned that in therapy, but it’s not like we didn’t have our moments. We tried, you know.”

Jason did know. For as doomed as they had been, Jason couldn’t say that he’d spent the first ten years of his life thinking he didn’t, at least, have a family between his two parents and him. Whatever they’d been, he didn’t find himself thinking too much or too hard about it, just that there were two people who consistently were obligated to take care of them and he liked them, even when he was a terror. They’d become more amicable the further they’d gotten from the divorce, with some time and effort. But even when they spoke like grown-ups, or teamed up to steer and rear Jason into someone functional (if he wouldn’t be obedient), or acted the family at Friday dinner or the High Holidays or what have you, Jason still didn’t see the married couple, however. Not even when they’d been together, a cohesive pair, was “married” and “couple” something he could ascribe to Trina and Marvin. Mom and Mendel were married, Dad and Whizzer were a couple, and Mom and Dad, were, Mom and Dad? See, if he squinted, and if he really watched them side-by-side, he could sometimes maybe see two college kids who, at the very least, saw each other for what they were. Who sat at Whizzer’s hospice bedside some days and more days at Marvin’s, who had apologized and gone to Trina and Mendel’s wedding ceremony, but respectfully skipped the reception. That all had to be worth, to add up to something, a few thousand words, at least.

His mother pulled out the next photo before he could come up with a good follow-up himself. She smiled at it, which was good, before glancing curiously back at Jason, then back at the photo, then back at Jason.

“You two together, side by side, used to be a trip,” handing Jason the photo, he recognized it with a small bit of fondness—him and his father in their den, pre-renovations, so up with the ugly green shag carpet, the two inherited and mismatched armchairs, and Dad’s fancy chess set. Jason, commanding white on one side, had been slow to grow, so even when he was, say, maybe seven in this photo, his little legs, barefoot, were still dangling from the loamy and squishy seat. His father, commanding black, looked weirdly young in this particular photo, mirroring the chin-to-hand position Jason held from across the board, tie undone around his neck and shirt untucked. Maybe it was the fact that here, he was healthy and just north of thirty, or maybe it was the hair, and how it was just a little too long. A little bit just like Jason’s was.

“Yeah?” was all he had said to that.

“Absolutely," she reared. "You both were so amusing. Watching you was like watching a tiny Marvin, it was horrifying. You walk the same. You sound the same. You give me the same look when you don’t like the vegetables on your plate. It’s unbelievable.”

Jason didn’t comment on her use of present-tense.

“Same one-track mind,” she continued with a shrug, distant, but coming back down to Earth. “Same tendency to _, I don’t know_ , work yourselves into the ground and get really, really focused on one big thing without, _say_ , considering everything else going on around it…”

Jason stopped bouncing his leg, needing all that energy to stop his eyes from rolling so far back into his head he’d be able to see his brain.

“Wow Mom,” he laughed, dry and unenthused. “It’s like you’re trying to tell me something.”

Mom sighed, taking their mugs and setting them off to the side to instead both of Jason's hands in hers. “I am _just saying_ , it is your senior year, Jason. You have worked so hard and done so well! You got into _Columbia_ , for crying out loud! I see you, I see how hard you’re thinking about this, and I don’t want you to make yourself crazy. I just want you to _enjoy_ your life.”

Not what he was expecting, it came back quickly—there’d been years, especially after his father graduated law school and started work, and especially before Jason started kindergarten, when his mother was this kind of omnipresent hand in his hand. There was a reason he went to her first, for anything. They’d been baby bag and untied shoes, Trina and Jason, constant companions, and the heavens knew what poor, impatient, picky, mean company Jason could be before he found some self-control. When his father insulted her, he used the same word he used to praise her by calling her a saint. It could go undetected, see, but Jews didn’t have saints, Catholics did—made out of stone, cold and hard, looming over them at prayer time. On the other hand, if anyone had the patience of a saint, Jason’s mother had any given Catholic beat.

The virtue here, was that she was honestly a little too good for them. And that was that.

Oh, there was that feeling in his chest again (he had a heart condition, probably, surely). Jason ignored the affection welling like a fist in his lungs and waited until she was mid-wine sip to dip out the kitchen door with a, “Hey, I almost forgot, I have another present for you.”

Mendel was falling asleep in front of the television when Jason tip-toed past him to grab his camera bag off the stairs. He threw the nearest quilt on him before heading back into the kitchen, nearly tripping on Bobby on his way back in. 

“I swear, he lays himself out like that _intentionally_  so that I trip on him.”

“Trust me, I am aware.”

Side by side with Dad’s box, Jason placed the camera bag down and fished for the envelope.

“I told you, I went all through Whizzer’s old film? Here’s that photo I found of Dad. It took some work to print clearly, but I think it turned out well,” Jason laid it down careful and slid it to her, her interest spurred. “I think I’m going to use it as the focal point Fraser wanted.”

Mom just smiled. Nothing behind it, but a sincere, small grin. “Oh Jason, you did a great job, it’s a lovely photo.”

Jason watched her take it all in, sinking a bit when her grin faltered slightly with, “He looks healthy.”

“That’s, uh, not all,” Jason stammered, pulling out the photo of him looking out his father’s apartment window next. “I found a few more in the same reel that Whizzer must have taken of me. You can keep that, if you want it.” As he slid that one across the table, he watched his mother’s face melt into something affectionate, overwhelmingly so.

“Oh, I love this one! My sweet boy,” she cooed, fond and sweet, sticking her bottom lip out. “Whizzer had a good eye.”

“That’s what I thought,” Jason agreed. He’d brought a few others with him—namely the bar mitzvah photo in his hand (for reference), and the few from the top of Dad’s old building (for aesthetic), but his mother seemed preoccupied at the moment, sipping her wine and admiring photos of boys gone by. He put a few of those down as well, just before it hit him.

Jason blinked. Once, twice. You know, his mother looked pretty in this light. Cheeks a little bit red from drinking, smile soft and gentle, nostalgic over melancholic, happily resigned to her life and all that had happened, looking at scattered photographs on the kitchen counter, the light above the oven putting something like a halo around her head. No one would know for better or worse that there had been a full cup of wine in that mug. No one would know whether or not she was posing, or she just happened to look this portrait-ready.

Jason’s thumb twitched as he reached for the camera, letting it rest in his palm as he thought and thought harder. He thought of his normal shots and style. He thought of Whizzer’s advice on doing portraits.

What if Jason did portraits for his project?

Wait.

_What if he did portraits?_

Of his mother, of Mendel, of The Lesbians, of the people who’d known his father and loved him anyway. Was there anything about him, about all of them that wasn’t political? Theological? Full of art or love or pain. It was simple, sure, but so, so complicated, but wasn’t that the point? They themselves had made the ordinary, subversive, took the ruins of nothing and made it everything to Jason, everything to Marvin. Kramer might’ve reveled in the drama, but truth was stranger than fiction, and his tight-knit family had so much to say, still.

Jason breathed in, glanced quickly at the bar mitzvah photo, and steadied to snap one, two photos before she could notice he’d had his camera at the ready. 37 left.

At the first click, her jaw began to drop. After the second click, she reached over to playfully hit him in the arm with a scowl.

“ _Jason!_ I wasn't ready! _"_

“Mom, it’s for the project!”

“You do not want me in your project!” she protested.

“Maybe I do!” he replied, with equal the vigor. She laughed at him openly now, thumbing her empty mug fondly.

"Really?" she asked, sounding, if anything, a bit surprised.

"Yeah, really," Jason assured her. All she did was blink at him, "This was really helpful, actually. I think it might be interesting to do a portrait series, of our family. Like you, and Mendel, and The Lesbians, and—"

Jason had been proud of this come-to moment, but then his mother _snorted_ at him, in the way she did only when he'd done something exceptionally dumb or when she was drinking.

"You were told to photograph something you don't understand, something _difficult_ and _dramatic_ and—" she'd never met Fraser, but her impression was fairly spot on— "you _choose your father_ and our little family band."

Jason's mouth opened to explain, but he stopped; he knew she understood, immediately, and better than even he could. She took a deep breath, holding a small hand to her heart to rest herself, "Jason."

"Mom."

"I love you. And I think whatever you do will make for a lovely portfolio," she reached out to put a hand on his face, tapping his cheek a few times. "And you're making that face again, like the one in your kindergarten picture, try not to get stuck like that."

Jason's cheeks twinged pink, he could feel it, as his face immediately softened. "Thanks."

"And if you want to talk to me about your father, you can. Without tip-toeing around it. You've always been allowed to. I mean it, I've done my work, I am not so delicate that you need to protect me, sweetheart, I am _fine_. I just want to make sure you are fine."

"I'm sorry! I wasn't sure where you were with it, we didn't really, you know, talk about it." Jason noted his use of "it" instead of, the truth, which was, you know, his father's passing, his father's death, his father's long-winded and painful descent, but surely, that was a bridge to cross another day.

"Well, now you know," his mother shrugged. "You can ask, it's important you keep asking questions."

Jason polished off his cup of wine, maybe that's why his face was getting redder, surely, it was genetic. Surely, he hadn't gotten it all from Marvin. 

"You know, when you were looking so nervous at dinner, I was sure you were about to tell us you were queer—"

" _Mom, oh my god—_ "

"I would be okay _—"_

_"Mom."_

Jason was eventually sent back to his apartment after more strong-armed hugs from his mother and Mendel, who told them it was okay to wake him up, that he probably shouldn't be falling asleep in front of the television. Tupperware refilled and a spring in his step, he was ready for another full night of work, his father's old box feeling lighter than it looked. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This...was a monster to finish. S/o to making thousand word one-shots into multi-chapter nightmare fics.
> 
> Don't worry, Mendel is coming back!!!


	3. not just paths you retrace, I'm talking mountains and space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I put together a playlist of some of the bops I've been listening to/inspired by when I work on this fic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVxhOzNeCNytAA2xrxaPu0SlwiVwsbb1f . I"ll probably continue to update it as I update this. 
> 
> Sooooo I might've lied about the update timeline as well as the general size of this fic. As it stands in the working doc, this fic is currently about publishable novel length (48,000~ words), and it's uhhhhh not done. So bare with me. It's all gonna happen eventually. 
> 
> Your gracious and lovely comments have been great motivators and I really appreciate you, yes you, taking the time to read this.

“Just wait until your father hears about this.”

Jason’s meltdowns were pretty next level these days. He’d always been finicky and particular, but the thoughtful, quiet, curious child he’d been known and beloved to be as well was at present taking a backseat to something of a? Demon? Maniac? Crazy person? Every day his mother stressed that it was something different—sleeping, not sleeping, bedwetting, allergies, sugar, over-parenting, not being there for him enough—but regardless, he was getting to be a little out of control. He had a mouth on him, a dangerous right hook, a staunch stubbornness to do anything he was told, and was above all, equally distressed and distressing.

Looking back on it, Jason remembered this time as being something—he didn’t even know how to describe it—frustrating? Overstimulating? Everything rubbed him the wrong way. He’d get these headaches from his brain feeling too big and too busy and overwhelmed with emotions he couldn’t name, let alone get out. Sometimes when he wasn’t yelling mean things at his fumbling, clumsy parents or slamming doors, he’d just pull the collar of his shirt over his head until he was in a tiny tent of fabric, quiet and alone. The social repercussions of this were obvious, far beyond getting sent home early after a trip to the principal’s office and suspended through the weekend, for, say, punching one of his classmates in the face for making fun of him. Jason knew most other people, peers and adults alike, didn’t know quite what to do with him sometimes. But to be fair, he didn’t really know quite what to do with himself either.

This did not exclude Jason’s father, who Jason was slowly realizing, had never really known what do with him other than three things:

One, he could play games with Jason. Jason enjoyed this, but was easily wrapped up in the competition, known for disowning his father entirely when he was about to lose.

Two, he could talk at Jason. This was hit or miss for him, as back and forth as his father’s capacity to share his wealth of knowledge and talk to Jason like an intelligent grown-up (at the museum, showing him the armor room, explaining how heavy the pieces were, how expensive it was, how different the armor knights wore for show was from what they wore for battle) or to look down at him like the scrawny seven year-old he was (when his mother was at her wit’s end trying to reason with his behavior and his father had to swing in with the book and gavel) (Jason’s father had once told him even if given the option he wouldn’t want to be a county judge, because they don’t really do much anyway).

Three, he could open Jason’s bedroom door late at night, when Jason was supposed to be asleep but only pretended to be, stand in the light of the hallway for about ten seconds, before closing the door and moving on. This is what replaced their good night hugs and kisses and I love yous as Jason approached ten, because that was Mom’s thing and fathers didn’t really do that in the seventies and Jason didn’t care for being touched, usually, anyway.

Other than those three things, there was sometimes a bit of a disconnect between them, either despite or in spite of the ways Jason could consciously recognize their similarities. Much like how his father called his mother a saint as both a compliment and an insult, his mother called his father a clown in much the same way; Jason, on the other hand, didn’t need anyone else to call him what he already knew he was. Clowns were reactionary and unpredictable and obnoxious so were the two of them, Jason and his father, especially those days, where they’d both stopped juggling simple bowling pins and started trying to wobble across an ever-thinning tightrope, still in their big ol’ clown shoes. Jason didn’t know what he himself would do if he’d found out his hypothetical son had gotten suspended for punching out another student at school, and surely this made him a clown; not knowing what his clown father would do in the same, non-hypothetical situation, well, that just added to the tension pooling between his eyebrows.

Jason heard the front door downstairs click shut, the sound of his parents’ hushed voices, but still he sat on his bed, feet swinging and kicking, hoping he’d hit something. Hoping maybe he could kick hard enough to hit himself in the face. So hard he could knock himself out. You can’t punish a dead man, after all.

“Hey _kid_ ,” uh-oh, someone was feeling feisty, that was always a bad sign, “come downstairs, please.”

Jason took a deep breath, resigned to his fate. He wondered what kind of scolding he would get, or punishment, dragging his feet to the top of the stairs like there was an iron ball and chain on either ankle. One week grounded? Two weeks grounded? Standing in the corner of the living room for the entire two days he was suspended?

Instead, when he padded onto the green carpet of the den, he found his father sitting at the far table by the window in one of their old, worn armchairs, setting up a chess set. Not his very fancy wooden one, the one he’d gotten from his grandfather, somehow saved from the war. No, it was new chess set, Jason realized with wonder and awe, as he watched each piece _click, click, click_ onto the board, magnetically sticking to their designated space.

Jason was perplexed—more than perplexed—more like completely in denial of what he was looking at. Had his father made a mistake and bought him a gift? Was it his birthday and he just forgot? Did his father know exactly how much Tommy deserved to get socked in the nose and was rewarding him justly? It was a nice chess set, it was shiny, it was magnetic, it might as well have been the Holy Grail. The corner table they kept the games on was indeed round, after all (Jason was very into medieval history at this time).

“Come, come and sit,” his father broke his train of thought, sounding something gentle as he gestured to the seat across from him, giving Jason reign of the white pieces. Any hope of not being in trouble faded, however, when Jason sat down and looked at his father’s face, completely devoid of any warmth or smiles or mercy (or at least, even more so empty since he’d been told to quit smoking while taking his medicine from the psychiatrist).

When Jason and his father spoke, they tended to move quick and clipped.

“You hit someone at school today?” _Click._

“Yeah.” _Click._

“Who?” _Click._

“Tommy Hirsch.” _Click._

“Why?”

_Click. Click. Click._

“Are we playing chess?” asked Jason.

“I asked you first,” that was the final click, the final pawn in place to create two mirrored and completed armies. “Why did you hit Tommy Hirsch?”

“Because he told me I was weird and stupid,” Jason folded his arms, letting his feet swing as he sat back into the stiff, old chair, the one with dull, embroidered roses on a violet cushion. “And a runt.” That wasn’t all of it, of course. Tommy, the literal definition of obnoxious, had gotten right up in Jason’s face to leer and jeer and make him look foolish in front of everyone. Everyone had laughed at him. Everyone. And it’s hard to ignore the bullies, Principal Zien, when their ugly, sneering face is your entire field of vision, plainer than the day is clear.

Jason’s father mirrored him, sitting back in the opposing and equally dull marigold chair and crossing his arms carefully. “And you thought the best way to prove you weren’t any of those things was to punch him in the face?”

It took everything in Jason to not audibly groan _._ The _lawyer_ thing. You know, when his father would basically just say what Jason just said back to him, just more mockingly somehow, in a way that was supposed to make him think his father had the answer before Jason could even give it, but just made him wanna swing his legs so hard he hit his Dad in the face.

Instead of channeling his inner Jackie Chan, he just scoffed. “What, isn’t it what _you_ would do?”

If his father was rattled by the accusation, it showed solely in one eyebrow raising; Jason resisted the urge to smirk. Jason hadn’t known his father to be capable of violence at this time, but that’s not really what this was about, right? It was about how he’d only been seven, and at the end of the day, could only be, know, understand what he could see. And there wasn’t a lot to see when you were busy making a fabric tent out of your t-shirt; the other clown in the house seemed the obvious place to look.

“I think I have a better idea,” Jason’s father just announced, humorless, gesturing instead to the chess board. Jason just squinted, glancing back and forth between the high contrast of the board and the way his father was sitting in his chair like some kind of evil wizard in a storybook.

“We’re going to play chess?” Jason asked.

“Sure.”

He frowned. “Where’s Mommy?”

“She’s out.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Taking a break.”

“Is she going to be back for dinner?”

A scoff. “Great question.”

“I don’t know how to play chess,” Jason frowned harder.

“I can show you.”

Quick to show, quick to learn—chess was complicated but Jason had no problem keeping up when it came things like this. This was fun, this was interesting, this was logical and analytical while giving Jason room to empathize with each piece on the board, riding the horse as the knight, sitting on top of the rook to see the whole of the battle, wearing the crown as the king. Chess was historically called the “King’s Game”, his father said. Gentlemen played it, royals played it, not just for fun, but as an intellectual showing of superiority, his father said. It was a smart game, very intelligent people played this game well, and there was the challenge his father had set, without verbalizing a challenge at all.

Jason was raring to go, wagging his feet and deciding, preemptively how he would move his pieces, how he’d slide into victory; his father was unmoved: “I won’t let you win,” he said.

“You never let me win,” Jason scoffed.

“Oh, on the contrary,” his father’s eyes narrowed as he matched Jason’s scorn near identically, “I most certainly do.”

Game one. Ended much sooner than Jason had ever watched a match end before, the ones in Central Park where the old men sat with the pigeons for hours without speaking. Unlike them, all it had taken was three moves, and he was already in checkmate. It was, simply put, insulting; he could feel the fire trying to flee through his hands as he balled them into fists, getting ready to swing.

“I said ‘checkmate’,” said Jason’s father from behind steepled hands, looking awfully, cruelly relaxed. Jason scrunched his face up and in a fleeting moment of rage, snatched the board on either side and tried to shake. He’d forgotten, in the redness of the moment, that the pieces were magnetic, and therefore, barely budged no matter how angry Jason’s thin little arms were.

“Are you done?”  

Admittedly, it’d been enough. Jason relaxed his face, setting the board down before taking a deep, disappointed breath.

“Good, you looked like you were going to pop a vein for that entire game.” Jason watched his father move the pieces back to their starting positions. “This time, play _smarter_ , not _harder._ Keep your wits about you.”

Game two. Jason kept his king better protected this time, dodging his father’s moves with lightning fast speed. _Click, click, click_ , just liked they talked—except the waiting, the waiting between his moves was excruciatingly painful. Unlike Jason, Dad took his time, giving the excuse that he needed to analyze each and every potential move, as that’s how the game was meant to be played. Fine, be that way.

“ _That’s how it was meant to be playedddd_ ,” Jason mocked, stringing his voice high and dumb.

So Jason brought out the insults. The mockery and the insults. The fidgeting in his chair and the insults. Full-volume, because the man in front of him was not his father, but his enemy, and no one else was home to tell him to use his inside voice or sit-up and talk like a big boy.

“Daddy’s a _prick_ ,” Jason had yelled, both of his legs hanging sideways over the armrest.

“Yeah?” His father hadn’t budged.

“You’re not my dad,” Jason had shouted, hanging upside down so he could only see the legs of the chair and table and man below the game.

He heard his father laugh at that one. “You wish.”

“I hate you,” Jason whispered, perched on both feet on the ugly violet seat cushion like a gargoyle, hovering over top of the game board.

He watched his father’s eyes flicker up at him. “No, you don’t.”

“Yes,” Jason leaned in, “I do.”

“No.” Checkmate. “You don’t.”

Game three. Jason was hungry, and he could feel himself getting tired, the chair he was sitting in practically holding him up. Father, unfazed by Jason’s obvious plight, was not running so weak, playing with the same even, obnoxious, consistent, annoying pace he had all evening. They were going to be here forever, and Jason would’ve been fine with that, if he wasn’t wrestling with his own will to prioritize victory over a break.

Jason made a turn, hardly thinking about the implications anymore. And so the great long silent pause began—

Jason’s father, practically a statue, moved his hands slowly away from his mouth, looking only at the board. “You forgot to say it,” he practically murmured.

“Say what?” asked Jason.

“Check.”

Jason bolted to sit up straight, analyzing the board carefully, realizing he had his father’s king nearly cornered. He watched as his father demonstrated, trying to use his turn to get his king to run away. But no matter where he tried to move, one of Jason’s pieces could easily overtake the tall black piece. He could hardly believe what he was seeing, clear as day before him.

“Checkmate?”

“Say it prouder.”

“Checkmate!” Jason cheered. He’d done it, he’d done that himself. He could barely contain his jittery, bouncy enthusiasm as he’d clicked his bishop to snatch up his father’s black king, holding it gingerly in his hand like he was holding something precious, that he didn’t think he’d ever find.

When his father put out a hand to take the pieces back, to clean up the board, Jason returned it without any fight, feeling nothing short of satisfied.

“Go into the kitchen, get yourself a sandwich out of the fridge,” he commanded, looking awful warm despite being a big loser. He neatly and swiftly folded the board and slid the pieces back into the box where they belonged. “Then wash your face and off to bed. I don’t want to hear a peep out of that bedroom once your mother is home, nor any word of you giving her lip this week when you’re home from school.”

He then handed the box to Jason, Jason watched it hang in mid-air before realizing he was supposed to take it with him. When he pulled the box from his father’s grip, it moved easy, like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. And that was that.

There was a moment, briefly, where Jason and his father got up from their respective, ugly armchairs at the same time and Jason thought maybe he was supposed to hug his father, like there was an expectation there. He didn’t know why he would do that, after everything that had just transpired, but he also kind of did know why he would do that, and he felt an inkling there that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with. But that was it, wasn’t it? Another feeling neither of them were sure what to do with, and so when Jason’s father looked down at him, watching him carefully, Jason just looked at the chess box again, spun on his heel, and did what he was told.

Jason wondered if the ways he treated his father when he was young ever really stuck with him.

Maybe it was sad to say, maybe it was embarrassing, maybe he’d underestimated it at the time, but learning how to play chess had been a turning point for Jason. It was what kicked off his evolution, his promotion from court jester to brave and noble and well-behaved knight. A knight who didn’t stress out his parents quite so much or lose his temper on the bullies at school, even if they deserved it. A knight who was able to condense every single obstacle in his way to a few simple moves across the black and white board. He practiced with his father. He practiced alone in order to defeat his father. He tried to teach his mother and failed miserably. He cognitively laid out the chess board in his head when the kids at school bothered him or when he felt overwhelmed and emotional. It was like he was working, preparing for something like a war or a coup where he’d prove to be his small country’s only line of defense.

There was a joke to be made here, probably, about kings and queens and kings becoming queens and laying attack to the land and overthrowing the royal house, but Jason wasn’t really one to play the clown anymore. And when his father packed a bag, kissed him and his mother, and clicked the front door shut behind him, Jason laid out his board.

* * *

 

 

By the time Jason had gotten back home to the apartment, he’d been perfectly sober, but usually once his face went red it didn’t recover for a while. Marnie knew this and knew this quite well, but ammo was ammo.

“Did you really get wasted with your family or is it that cold outside?” she asked him from where she was laid out on the couch, both feet soaking in a large ice bucket, her purple blanket wrapped around her in a burrito where only her head stuck out of the fabric.

“You had to go outside to even get home from rehearsal,” said Jason, depositing the Dad Box and his camera bag on the kitchen table. “Don’t you know how cold it is outside?”

“I don’t even remember,” she whined, “I’m so tired that all I can remember is that I’m tired. And sore. And hungry.”

“An absolute tragedy. All I can offer you besides my condolences,” Jason pulled out the tupperware of meatloaf and vegetables and potatoes from his bag, holding it up for Marnie to see, “is my leftovers?”

The expression of unabashed and glorious relief on Marnie’s face was enough, he popped it in the microwave before she could ask, “is that from Trina or from Mendel?”

“Mendel.”

And just like that, the relief was gone; Marnie’s head drooped back onto top of the couch, “You know, I’ll eat it out of respect. And exhaustion. But mostly for Mendel, because I love him, even though he’s never heard of seasoning before.”

Marnie and Ben were no strangers to Saturday night dinners with Jason and his family. Mom and Mendel, being, well, Mom and Mendel, had insisted Jason invite them over a few times freshman year, had cleaned the house spotless to make them feel welcome, wanted to get to know them not just before he moved in with them, but for the sake of knowing them. Maybe his family was nosy, maybe they were curious, maybe they were relieved that Jason finally had actual friends who didn’t shove him into lockers, so relieved it didn’t matter that neither of them were even a little Jewish, so long as they were polite and respectful. The fact that Jason’s friends actually _liked_ going to his house and meeting his family was just a perk for them.

Marnie scarfed down half the slab of meatloaf before Jason could even ask if she wanted water or tea or anything, so he just assumed both and went for a glass and the kettle as she ate.

“Please don’t forget to breathe,” he said, droll and wry.

“Honestly,” she panted through a mouthful, “you could’ve handed anything to me, and it still would be the best meal I’ve ever had. But just tell Mendel that last part, that’s all he needs to know.”

“Will do.” Jason placed a glass of water on the coffee table in front of Marnie, she might’ve muttered a ‘thank you’ but it was hard to tell until she finally swallowed.

“And tell your parents they should come to my senior recital.”

The teapot whistled, high and loud. Jason, his rosy cheeks stinging cold in the warmth of their apartment, got to sorting through their accumulated collection of tea options, thinking of how nearly three years ago, his mother had made herself worried sick that Jason was moving into a rinky-dink Manhattan apartment with _a girl_ (and Ben, Jason reminded her). Her baby, with a girl (also Ben, Mom). A girl who wasn’t even Jewish (Ben wasn’t Jewish either, Mom). Jason figured it wasn’t fair to run around telling people Marnie’s sexuality, only for her to throw an arm to rest on Jason’s shoulder, which was at least six inches above her own, and announce brightly and through heart-shaped sunglasses on move-in day that, don’t worry, Mrs. Weisenbachfeld, “I like girls”.

Jason had never seen his mom so relieved to see a gay person in his life.

“You want my parents at your senior recital?” asked Jason, carefully pouring hot water into one mug, two mugs—he heard their front door slam, the sound of boots stomping on the doormat—three mugs, including Ben, who’s shift at the library seemed to have just ended.

“Hell yeah, I just said that I love them.” Marnie’s mouth was still full. “And they’ll offset the stress of my parents being there.”

“Marnie, I’m telling you,” Ben interjected; Jason wasn’t looking at them, but what he heard could only be the sounds of Ben laying his entire weight across the couch and Marnie as she howled in fake, overdramatic agony. “I will take one for the team, do you a solid, and pretend to be your boyfriend if it means your parents will get off your ass.”

“ _Ben!_ Please get _off_ me! I’m _eating!_ I’m _sore!_ ”

“Jason can be your other boyfriend. Right, Jason? _Jasooon_ ,” Ben called. Turning to look with three steeping and steaming tea cups in hand, his suspicions were confirmed; Jason watched as Marnie tried to hold her bowl of leftovers high above her head, Ben laying sprawled on top of her, head left to dangle upside down inches from the floor.

“What’s more heterosexual than one boyfriend?” Ben asked.

Jason shrugged. “Two boyfriends?”

“Bingo!” Ben cried, making an attempt to sit himself upright, Marnie crying from laughing so hard. “We’re here to help, Marn. Jason’s going to law school, I’m becoming one with the winds and the earth and also I happen to be _incredibly handsome_. Together, we’ll be one whole functional man.”

“He’s Jewish, and you’re Sikh, that gets me easily twice as many Bad Child points as having a girlfriend. Or being a dance major,” Marnie rolled her eyes.

“But a minor in arts administration,” reminded Jason and Ben in unison, in the same way they had many times before. Jason handed both of his roommates a steaming mug before sitting on the third and last cushion on the couch.

Just for a moment, they all went still and serene, breathing in the tea steam and its familiar, safe aroma before they each took a sip from their cups.

“Jason,” Marnie broke the calm first, sounding something incredulous. “Did you really just hand me black tea at 11 o’clock at night?”

Jason looked down at his own cup—chamomile—before swapping the mugs with Marnie next to him. “Sorry, that’s mine.”

“You’re drinking black tea at 11 o’clock at night?” asked Ben, much less surprised than Marnie had been. “You planning on sleeping ever?”

Jason shrugged, noncommittally shaking his head as he sipped. “Fraser needs something to look at for my senior project on Tuesday.”

“And let me guess,” Marnie ventured. “You had all semester to figure something out, and you waited until the last minute to start working.”

“What gave it away?” Jason asked, feigning innocence.

“The new box you just brought in, for starters,” said Marnie.

“The fact that you got a lampshade on your head,” said Ben.

Jason blinked. Ben pulled the lampshade from the lamp next to him and put it over top Jason’s head, the weird, cream pattern becoming his entire field of vision.

“That literally wasn’t even funny when you did it this morning,” Marnie chided to Ben on her left before turning her attention to Jason on her right, lifting the shade up from one of the bottom tassels to look him in the face, tired and grim. “And _you_ , would you take one night off from working and being ridiculously industrious? For your own health and well-being?”

“Oh, let him be, Marnie, he’s Meursault, this project is his ocean.”

Marnie and Jason turned slowly to look at Ben, who was otherwise peacefully sipping his tea. “His _what_?”

“You know. Camus. Absurdism. Seemingly nonsensical actions used to create meaning out of the pointlessness of the universe despite constant dissatisfaction and continual rejection.”

“I didn’t say the project was _absurd_ ,” said Marnie.

“It’s a little absurd,” said Jason, taking the lampshade off his head completely to lay it at his feet.

“I said _you_ were absurd.”

“Well, we can all sit here and state facts, Marnie.”

“And there’s the ocean,” said Ben, nodding towards the box Jason had left on the kitchen table, sitting there, staring at them, barely held together by tape and a prayer.

Ben had been Jason’s freshman year roommate, after doing a quick switch with two of the buff, blond lacrosse bros whose names were similar but not the same (Riley and Ryder? Evan and Ethan? Keith and Kevin?) The thing about Ben, Jason learned right away, was even though trouble seemed to look for him about as intently as he seemed to looked for trouble, he had an extremely uncanny talent for making adults love him. His professors fawned over him despite being a so-so test taker, the janitors in the dorms thought he was just an angel despite creating in his living space nothing short of a disaster area. Anyone who could crack Marnie’s parents were sure to have talent, and he could run circles at the dinner table with Mendel about the idealism of the 1950’s and the state of New York post-Koch. Bullshitting, for the sake of bullshitting with others, bullshitting to build bridges and not just work mindlessly; Jason could only wish for Ben’s kind of talent, for Ben’s audacity to do things like comfortably be himself and major in philosophy without shame.

“What’s that all about, anyway?” asked Marnie. “Another box?”

“It’s my dad’s things. My mom passed it off to me at dinner, figuring I might want to take a look at it. For the project. It’s mostly photographs and stuff.”

“Are you in any of those?”

“Definitely, somewhere,” Jason replied. “I don’t really know what’s gonna be in there, but at the very least there’s the envelope of photos we had up for the funeral—” no one blinked or missed a beat, neither of them ever did when Jason brought up the weirder or harder parts of his upbringing. He liked that— “I’m definitely in a bunch of those, probably in more that I haven’t even seen yet.”

“Good,” Marnie nodded, the buoyant coils of her hair bouncing with each up-and-down of her head. “I’m on the hunt for some embarrassing baby Jason photos to hang up in my room.”

Jason just shook his head, snorting into his mug.

“Oh _true_.” Ben, being the only one of his roommates currently able to move their feet, slid across the room like he was clearly up to no good, cradling the Dad Box like a baby as he danced back to the couch and dropped it on the coffee table with a heavy thump. “I love looking at old family photos, I always feel like I’m looking at something I’m not supposed to be.”

“And we can help you go through them all, you know, keep it simple. Help you decide which photos _not_ to use as inspiration,” Marnie said through their laughter.

On one hand, Marnie and Ben were probably the only people who’d gotten Jason’s, and subsequently, his father’s whole story.

“Which photos serve no function other than, say, going up in my room.”

On the other hand, photos made it real, made it honest, and he despite knowing better, he wondered how much of the box’s contents would make them uncomfortable. How much was in here that Jason didn’t know, hadn’t known before, and would make _him_ uncomfortable, let alone his friends.

“Which photos deserve to be immortalized in the Louvre.”

On the other hand, they were just joking around, putting off going to bed and trying to hang out for what they knew was one of their last weekends as roommates. And trying to take care of him, in a weird way.

“Which ones you should absolutely try to pass off as your own instead of selling your soul to The Art one last time.”

On the other hand, Jason didn’t feel making up an excuse to get the box away, or doing anything other than sip his tea and sit with his friends, now that that was an option. But he wasn’t about to stop working either, and waiting until he understood a solid thematic frame in which to place his father for his project before he put his head to a pillow seemed like a reasonable enough goal for tonight. The only win-win here was to sit back and let this happen.

“Isn’t this is what friends are for,” Ben said, making a question sound like a statement.

Sure?

“Do what you want,” is what Jason would’ve said if his silence wasn’t already understood as permission, so he watched instead as they both sneezed off the layer of dust that’d settled into the top flaps of cardboard and peer into the box of miscellaneous papers before them, verbalizing the categories of pictures they would try to make piles of. Family photos could go over here, old photos over there, weird ones (and pictures of Trina, said Ben, before Jason smacked the back of his head) would go over by Ben, pictures of Jason in front of Marnie.

And so his friends each took a stack and got to shuffling through; Jason took another drink, nearing the bottom of his cup, counting in his head the t-minus until someone finally said—

“Holy shit, Jason, you look just like your dad,” Marnie exclaimed, holding a photo up to Jason’s nose, too close to actually see. “I like, kind of knew, but I’ve obviously never seen him as much as I’ve seen Trina and Mendel, I didn’t realize how crazy the resemblance was.”

Carefully, Jason pinched the corner of the photo, holding it a little bit further away—in front of him was his dad’s law school photo, wallet-sized and folded a little at the edges. In the picture was his father in his most natural state: uninspired, judgmental, if a bit melancholic. He had more hair in the photo than Jason had ever remembered him having, the bags under his eyes only beginning. If Jason remembered correctly, he would’ve been something like three or four years old when his father graduated law school. If his mom hadn’t held onto it, he’d probably find the picture that used to be on their mantle, of his father, in his graduation robes, holding Jason in one hand with the other wrapped around his mom’s waist by the shade of a tree, an old, nameless, brick building at Yeshiva behind them.

“His hair’s lighter,” was all Jason said, handing the photo back so as to not break the methodical organization that was going on before him. “So are his eyes. He looks more goyish than I ever could,” he shrugged.

Ben took it next, getting a closer look before placing it in the middle of the table. “I’ve never met this man, but I know from looking at you, when he smiles, it’s all gums, right?” Marnie teased. “How right am I?”

Jason tried to glare at her, but instead Marnie just pointed at the photo with a look that told him he’d only proved her point.

“Is this one you?” asked Ben, holding up a black-and-white photo of a small boy in denim overalls standing in a garden Jason didn’t recognize, looking only slightly less pissed off than the law school photo. Jason forgot, at one point, his father was also a child once and wasn’t brought into this world in his mid-thirties, sarcastic and whip-smart and bitter with a corduroy blazer and bags under his eyes.

“Nope, that’s Dad.” He wondered if he ever crawled into his parent’s bed at night when he was young too. He wondered if his parents made him come home for dinner on the Sabbath in college.

“How about this one?” A picture of two children now, his father, a little bit older and a little bit happier to be photographed, coming up only to the waist of a tall, thin girl standing next to him, with long, pin-straight dark hair. They were in Central Park, holding kites, smiling wide.

“Still Dad.” Dad and the aunt Jason hadn’t met, Aunt Susanna, the one who’d died when his father was a kid. It was weird to look at her, all big brown eyes and toothless smile only to realize first, how differently she looked from his father, and second, how little Jason actually knew about her. Jason wondered if his Dad had missed her when he was still alive, and if not, when he’d stopped. Her obituary was sure to be in there somewhere, Jason would have to keep an eye out for it.

“This one?” The corner of Ben’s mouth twitched when he held up the photo—it was one of Jason, admittedly, very, very young, sitting at the table in front of what was undoubtedly one of his mom’s homemade birthday cakes, ‘Happy Birthday Marvin’ written on it curly in blue icing. Jason had been allowed to blow out the candles, but had started crying when one had actually gone out. _Thankfully,_ someone had thought to snap a photo of _that_ , huh?

Jason couldn’t help but laugh a little at it now. “Wow, you got me,” he said, dripping sarcasm, reaching out to get a closer look at the photo, the flash making the laughing faces of his parents wash out into white.

“ _Aww_ , this one isn’t Dad. This one’s sweet,” Marnie cooed, thumbing a circle into the photo she’d been currently holding, looking it over and over.

“Which one?” Reaching for the photo, Jason had expected something like a baby photo, him in his old baseball uniform, his family at the beach. What he found instead— _click._

It was a picture of him and Whizzer, fast asleep in Whizzer’s hospital bed, sometime near the end. His hand was curled around the collar of Whizzer’s bathrobe, Whizzer’s right arm wrapped around his back, nesting him in close.

It came back fast —he’d nearly forgotten. It’d been a near non-existent winter, making everyone wait in some kind of chilly, fall-smelling limbo for snow to hit Manhattan until February. His father had gone out to help his mother and Mendel push their car off the curb after dropping Jason off on a Friday where a temperature drop hadn’t brought snow, but had frozen everything over. It was late, and looking at Whizzer getting ready to fall asleep made Jason’s eyes droop in a way they hadn’t quite been able to in a while. His father must’ve taken it, if not Charlotte or another nurse who was on duty. At the time, it probably looked sweet, the two of them snug and close; if it’d happened any later, he never would’ve been allowed to be near Whizzer like that.

“That’s the boyfriend, right?” asked Marnie, soft and curious.

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“That’s just precious, he must have really loved you.”

Jason just nodded, placing the photo carefully on the arm of the couch to his side, to save for later.

He didn’t tell anyone his father and Whizzer died of AIDS-related illnesses. Not initially, or almost at all since. If someone knew about his dad, it was skin cancer. If they knew about Whizzer, if Jason even mentioned him, it was pneumonia. Or a car accident, so no one put two-and-two together about two sick male “friends” at the start of the eighties. Jason didn’t know if he was protecting them or himself with that lie.

But he’d gotten comfortable in college, and it became something like common knowledge to anyone who knew Jason well enough to ask about his family—sky was blue, grass was green, Jason’s step-dad was not his dad, and his actual dad was dead (from skin cancer). With no one from high school around to spread rumors about anything different, Jason let it be, figuring it was no one’s business anyway to ask for clarity. The fun thing about college was that no one really gave a shit about his personal life anyway, outside of who he was or wasn’t screwing and where he was getting his weed.

Until, of course, the fucking Columbia kids decided to venture downtown for the weekend, crashing NYU parties because they felt entitled to and what the hell _didn’t_ they feel entitled to, right? Being honest, four years into his degree now, Jason still didn’t even know if he liked politics. The poli sci degree, truthfully, was mostly for his family’s breathability, but fewer things brought Jason as much joy than drunkenly dunking on snooty Ivy League brats who had challenged him to some kind of bullshit pseudo-intellectual debate on current events without reading up on the topic past a headline. Who the hell crawled out of Columbia’s ass long enough to go to another school’s (it didn’t even have to be NYU, it just needed to not be a Columbia) party to fucking talk politics anyway? It was obnoxious, and ridiculous, and was it obvious enough Jason hated them? Not obnoxious or ridiculous enough to stop Jason from applying to Columbia for law school, but even he could concede that maybe, just maybe, there were similarities in the cloth they were cut from. The difference being, of course, that the Ivies liked play up the pride of being smarter than everyone else; Jason actually was smarter than everyone else. Smarter than the Columbia kids he was debating healthcare with at one particularly lame frat kegger, smarter than their parents and their stupid old money (as opposed to his parents and their stupid old money, whom he was still smarter than, mind you), and definitely smarter than Tommy Hirsch, who had bumped into Jason and his friends in his stupid letter jacket with the big white “C” on this especially drunken night his sophomore year.

He’d been so close to getting these assholes to shut up before very violently feeling shoved back into his sixteen year-old self, body, mind, trying to stand tall against the jests of the star quarterback and his posse. He hadn’t been touched at all, however, only eyed and judged and greeted with the same old, same old plastic sneer of a smile.

“Jason? Wow man, crazy seeing you here,” said Tommy, tone already dripping in condescending sarcasm, as if seeing Jason at a party at his own school was the weirdest thing in the fucking world. If he hadn’t been so drunk, maybe he could’ve upped the ante here, and started to really sell how well he was doing, how much he’d done since high school, that he’d grown a few inches and was not so easy to shove into a locker now, Tommy. But he had been so suddenly reminded of exactly how drunk he was, and moreover was acutely aware of his own lack of steady equilibrium.

“It’s been a while,” Jason agreed, and that was all he said.

“You know this fucking asshole?” asked one of the assholes Jason had just been talking with (read: talking at), who was clearly the bigger asshole because he was wearing a fucking J.Crew sweater to a party, Jesus Christ.

“Know him? Why, Jason and I practically grew up together,” Tommy clapped a hand on Jason’s back and made everything inside him cringe in disgust. “We were in almost all the same classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, right, man?”

Jason bit the inside of his cheek. “Yep,” he said, popping his lips on the “p”.

Tommy was putting on this weird air, like he was leading up to something, like he used to when he was leading up to shove Jason into a wall or corner him in the school parking lot. It was calm and circling, calculating, but Jason didn’t want to give him the benefit of calling him smart. He mostly just wanted to make sure he didn’t throw up on his or anyone else’s shoes, so he kept quiet.

“Yeah, it’s weird that we’ve gone this long without seeing each other, right?” Tommy, ever unaware of the concept of personal space, curled into Jason, tapping his beer bottle against Jason’s chest like they really were long-lost chums or something.

Like he wanted to make sure Jason heard what he said next. “It’s been so long in fact, I never got to say how sorry I was to hear about your dad after graduation.”

Jason stiffened.

“I know cancer can be a real _pain in the_ _ass_.”

Oh, okay. Alright. Okay. Fine. Okay. Okay. Okay.

The needle on the record of Jason’s ability to keep and verbalize coherent thoughts had just been knocked off its track. He still wasn’t sure how long he kept the Columbia kids standing there, laughing at him,  watching him completely leave and return to his sad, drunk body, before, oh yeah, Marnie and Ben, who’d been maybe only half-present for his debating spiel, moved in for a little damage control.

“Dude, that was _fucked up,_ ” Ben, ever eloquent, had said, tall and wide enough to encompass Jason in his shadow when he stepped between him and Tommy. Jason hadn’t been around to see what bullshit intellectualism the Columbia kids had to say to that, not with Marnie using all of her weight to push him away from the group and out onto the frat house stoop. She was saying something, but Jason was busy being all too aware of his corporeal form and how distant it felt and how it’d been a while since he had to watch the world move quite this fast.

“Jason, bud, please _breathe_ ,” she slurred, clearly also a little tipsy herself, “I’m sorry you had to hear that, they don’t understand what it’s like to watch someone die of cancer—in for five, hold for five, out for five, good—what they do understand is that they’re being fucking dicks and they kno—”

“It was AIDS.”

“ _What?_ ”

Jason blinked, following Marnie’s breathing instructions as if the inhale would return his soul back to his body. “My dad had AIDS, and then he died.” Messy, but it was the first time Jason would say it to anyone. “Him and Whizzer.”

Marnie’s eyes narrowed. “What’s a Whizzer?”

“His friend. Boyfriend. Whatever.”

He knew why Marnie immediately went in to hug him after he said it, and despite rationalizing it as just one of the facts of life (sky was blue, grass was green, Jason’s dad had AIDS and then he died), his hands were shaking. Ben eventually found them sitting there, wearing a shit-eating grin like he had a story to tell (read: he’d started a fight with the Columbia kids but slipped out when one of them got knocked into the bowl of jungle juice). When Jason explained why they needed to leave now before he had a full-blown panic attack in the middle of a kegger, something clicked, immediately, an understanding without Jason ever having to explain. They’d spent the rest of the night sitting in a 24-hour diner, eating meatball omelettes and playing the same three Beastie Boys songs on the jukebox over and over and over.

Jason had kept Marnie and Ben close ever since.

“Jason, you good? You zoned out for a minute there,” Ben tapped him on the shoulder repeatedly and Jason was snapped back to reality. “Zoned out almost exactly when I was about to ask if I could keep this picture of your mom.”

Jason recoiled so immediately and snatched the photo out of Ben’s hand, saying something about how Ben was absolutely disgusting before getting a good look at the photo, only to realize it was himself in a Darth Vader costume for Halloween. Ben just laughed a deep stomach chortle at him and took it back, adding to the now much taller piles organized like decks of cards across their coffee table.

“Hey, you two,” Marnie scolded, throwing a heavy stack of not photographs, but envelopes and papers, onto Jason’s lap, “get back to work.”

As Marnie and Ben debated who would get the honor of keeping the Darth Vader Halloween photo, Jason begun to thumb through some of the stack, taking one last sip of his lukewarm tea. Some of the envelopes had gone through the mail, some had just his father’s name on them, some had both his parents names on them, and, Jason took note, a few with just “Dad” scribbled on the front at varying levels of aptitude. Further down, carefully held together with a few paperclips, was a collection of pictures Jason had drawn when he was much younger. They weren’t great, Jason had never been an artist, but here they were anyway—Father’s Day Cards, drawings of his family, one of a jungle scene, with a scratchy fat lion and a giraffe that didn’t have any legs that Jason recognized used to be up in his father’s office at work. He set them all down, one by one, on one of the few remaining open spots on the coffee table, before he let his chest twinge any more.

Jason came to a screeching halt about halfway through the stack, though, when one of envelopes looked strange and pulled his full attention back into the fray. It was an envelope, so old it had started turning yellow, with “my son” written on it in a scratchy sort of penmanship.

It didn’t matter if he knew better, his heart raced anyway, despite not recognizing the writing style. What was he supposed to do, _not_ wonder if it was some kind of card meant for him that he’d never gotten the chance to receive? Flumbling to undo the back flap, Jason slid out what was inside: it was a card with a sailboat on it, with “Congratulations Graduate” written across the top. The inside was disappointing; assuming there’d been money that had been taken out of the pocket, Jason took note of how blank and bare the inside covers had been before reading what little, scratchy writing was there, surrounding the print typed already into the card.

 _Marvin_ , **SET THOSE SAILS** , _a good man never fails. Signed, Dad._

Wow. Just profound.

Jason scoffed, folding the card back together and slipping it back into the yellowing envelope. Getting your law school grad son, who was internally pressed up against the farthest back wall of the closet and had already gotten a girl pregnant out of wedlock, mind you, a congrats card that reminded him _‘hey, fuck up again and you’re a piece of shit’,_ writing ‘signed’ instead of ‘love’ —it was deeply representative, maybe, of the reason why Jason was only half-aware of some of the things in this box. The truth was, Jason could sit and wonder what was going on behind the photos of his dad and his sister, of his dad in the high school play, of his dad frowning in a family photo in Israel, but that’d be missing the point. They hadn’t been what he’d kept close, organized with paperclips or in frames on the mantle where everyone could see. He’d kept them, sure, but his mother’s words from dinner echoed with him even now: _“it’s complicated.”_

Setting the envelope down on the table, the whole rest of the stack on the arm of the couch, Jason decided, for reasons he could ponder tomorrow, next week, to Fraser, to no one, that he didn’t want this project to be so convoluted. If he was going to do this right, why not aim for they simplicity, the honesty they both, all, desperately needed?

While Marnie and Ben laughed at another photo of him, this time at a dumb face he'd made as an infant, Jason noticed out of the corner of his eye that the ice cubes in Marnie’s bucket were completely melted, their mugs each dry and empty. He also noticed, strangely, unusually, that his eyes were tired.

“I think,” he announced, not meaning to sound quite so serious, but sounding so nonetheless. “I think I’m gonna go to bed.”

Where they should’ve at least teased him for being a sour sport about his own baby photos, Marnie and Ben instead looked at him with some strange sort of pride.

“Wow, it’s not even midnight, and he’s going to bed.”

“Taking care of himself.”

“They grow up so fast.”

“We must’ve worn him out.”

“I’m like, proud of us?”

When he tried to get up, Jason instead found himself at the bottom of a three-person pile-up, two familiar bodies obnoxiously sprawled on top of him as they continued to congratulate themselves incessantly. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t think they were at least a little amusing, as if he’d ever show it under all of their weight. After pleading on behalf of the couch that would surely break beneath them, they’d gotten up and dusted themselves off, conceding that they’d all had long days and it might be nice to get some much-needed rest before another week in paradise. Jason did not hug his roommates or kiss them good night, they’d never been quite into that sort of thing, he just waited until they were asleep before he plodded back out into the living room to intensely vet the baby photos of himself and hide the more embarrassing ones from seeing daylight ever again. Only then would he try to go and finally get some shut-eye, for their sake anyway.

* * *

 

Jason started praying when Whizzer got sick and stopped praying when Whizzer died. He decided he didn’t want anything to do with an all-powerful being that wouldn’t even answer the prayer of a twelve-year-old boy literally begging for his best friend to stay alive and come to his bar mitzvah. As far as he was concerned at the time, G-d could suck his d-ck. Of course, he’d mellowed out a lot since then, stepped back into a temple for Purim once or twice, recalled a good amount of his Hebrew, and so on. Even atheist Jews were still Jews, and even atheist Jews ate challah and holishkes, even the worst Hebrew prayer sang better than the best Christian hymn, and that was an absolute indisputable fact. But there were only so many times he could beg to the Lord up above to bring someone back and not be heard. Jason had done it twice already.

In the 48 hours between becoming a man of faith to renouncing religion entirely, Jason debated whether he’d have to mourn a whole year for Whizzer like he’d been taught other, more observant Jews did for their parents. On one hand, Jason didn’t understand why there had to be rules about not listening to music or attending parties or cutting his hair when he didn’t want to do those things anyway. He didn’t want to do anything. Being told not to do anything just seemed redundant when it was the obvious choice between living and, say, laying outside until the snow and ice covered him and he melted with it all come spring. On the other hand, Whizzer wouldn’t have let him lay down and play dead, Whizzer would tell him to go enjoy himself, go do things he shouldn’t, go do things that made him happy. On the other hand, Whizzer wasn’t here to tell him those things anyway. And the people who were here to tell him to get up and walk it off also needed to be told that they couldn’t be weeping for Whizzer forever—if that was anyone’s responsibility, it was Jason’s, and only for a year.

He wasn’t stupid. He saw how things were. His mother was volatile, his father delicate, and Mendel was, well, Mendel—the quickest way to get any of them out of themselves and functioning again, he was aware, was to need them. He was, after all, the only coddled son of two neurotics. The presence that forced his parents to get out of bed, to take him to school, to get him food, to find a routine. And they were Jewish, after all, there was a routine for everything. Aninut, Shivah, Shloshim, say the Kaddish and keep going. Get up. Walk it off. Muscle through it. Take it like a man.

The first few weeks were the toughest. Everyone looked at Jason with sad eyes, but at least they looked at him. At least they worked on it. There was something to hold onto when they were all vulnerable like that, and that something was each other. When they all took each other by the hand and sighed a deep sigh together, a single, vaguely fulfilling truth passed through them: it’s not like it could get any worse.

Except Dad got laid off a little after that first month without Whizzer.

Why his father felt the need to sit him down to awkwardly and cryptically be honest with him about important things, Jason had always been perplexed by, but nonetheless Jason had been sat down by his father over lunch one afternoon during the summer, who shared with minimal eye contact that he’d been fired from the only job he’d ever had—

“Not fired,” Dad had said, taking a sip of his water but not touching his food. “Asked to resign.”

—and if Jason had any questions he should feel free to ask them. Jason asked questions in rapid-fire, Dad had answered them just as quickly.

“Okay then, why were you asked to resign?”

“On paper? Downsizing.”

“Okay, but why were you really asked to resign?”

“My boss found out about Whizzer, how sick he got. Since they couldn’t legally ask me to get tested, they asked me to leave.”

“Why does that matter to them?”

“They think I could get them sick as well. The experts, the doctors think it started with men like us.”

You know, Dad never said “gay”. Or “homosexual”. Never used “queer” either. Never said it once. Never called Whizzer his boyfriend, although Jason could reason that one out himself. It was just strange, in a way he understood, that they never just said out loud this thing they were all very aware of. 

“Are you going to get sick like Whizzer was?”

A beat. Jason knew now that that either meant “yes” or “maybe” or “we don’t know yet because they’re still working on what it is but they’ve taken at least a quart of my blood for tests and the prognosis is looking grim” and not at all what his father actually said: “No.”

But, his dad was getting a new job. He might have an in doing some legal stuff at the hospital Charlotte worked at. He’d be keeping the apartment, they’d still be neighbors with the Lesbians, he could keep paying child support. Everything would be alright, Jason, he was just owed conversations like this, as a man now, see? That was all. And Jason believed him, because it'd been years since he didn't believe anything his father said, because he was proud of his father for eating a meal and tying his shoes and shaving and not crying yet today, all accomplished before noon. They finished their lunch under the awning of the Italian restaurant down the street and they lived harmoniously as grief could let be for another three months. Only four months into Jason’s year of mourning Whizzer, mind you.

Until one late summer day, when his mother came to pick him up from his father’s apartment, Dad had asked Jason to put his headphones on and give them a moment, they needed to talk about something. Jason, when asked, barely cared, until they went into the room his dad kept for him, leaving him in the living room with nothing to do but hum along to David Bowie and stare out the great, big window and ponder, alone.

See that, that was weird. He’d thought his parents had gotten over their issues arguing in front of him a while ago, what were they talking about that they were so keen on now? He thought maybe it had something to do with him, but his birthday wasn’t soon at all, and he’d been on the up-and-up (or at least, as much as he could be) these days. Jason had been working harder than he let on to take these last few months to act like a grown man, he wondered if his parents saw through that. He wondered if not him, what they would be talking about.

Jason, from the couch, turned his head to look at the door behind him—the knob had always been kind of busted, slipping open with the most minimal of efforts. It was like that now, the door cracked ever so slightly that he could see from where he was sitting, his mother sitting on his bed, his father facing her with his back to the doorframe.

Jason quickly slid his headphones off when he noticed his mother was crying.

Expecting to hear one or both of them yelling, _hey that’s far out, so you heard him to-o_ had instead been cut off by dead air. He concentrated, closed his eyes, trying to hear the hushed voices from behind the door.

“How long do you have then? Before it gets bad?”

“Charlotte can’t be sure, but at this stage if I’m careful it could be years.”

“ _Could?_ Jesus Christ, Marv—”

“I’ve been told there’s no reason to believe I won’t be healthy enough through Jason’s next birthday at least. That’s my goal, anyway.”

Healthy enough? Healthy enough. Enough.

“Be careful around him,” his mother said, wiping her tears away with her hands. “Until we know more about it. If he _ever_ got that sick…”

That sick.

The thing about Whizzer was that, it’d started when he picked up one of those dumb bugs that went around and everyone got when the weather started to cool off, you know? It’d started with a sore throat which turned into a virus which turned into pneumonia and he’d just disintegrated, thinking if he could just get back into the swing of things, he’d be fine, it’d be fine. But then he’d collapsed at the gym and suddenly Jason was spending his free time at the SDU and the one thing everyone kept saying was that they didn’t realize he was or could’ve ever been “that sick”.

Jason suddenly couldn’t hear anything, anything at all, except ringing in his ears. He blinked, once, twice, watching his mother’s lips move but only hearing the ringing, ringing, ringing. The world was shaking, he thought, or at least his hands were. The world was shaking his hands for him, running them cold while his heart cried out to God above: _what the actual hell?_

Jason did not wait to see if his father turned around for him as he dropped his stuff on the couch and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him.

He tore off, down several flights of stairs to the lobby to the bustling street below, ears still ringing. Not knowing which way to go, and not caring, he ran down the block and around the corner, doing his best not to bump into anyone, not being able to hear them cursing at him regardless. He didn’t care about them anyway. Fuck them. Fuck everything.

He couldn’t do this again, god. He wouldn’t do this over _again, God_ . Turning corners, running down alleys, jumping over trash, Jason wouldn’t bargain with you again, YHWH, this time he would yell and you would listen. _Stop! Stop! DON’T!_ He ran harder, thinking of his father now, heading toward the intersection, him turning, bleeding into Whizzer. Whizzer thin, Whizzer dying, getting ready to make the final countdown at the crosswalk before the light turned green…

Something snatched the back of his shirt before he could step over the curb, of course. Jason found himself suddenly falling backwards, colliding into another body that wrapped its arms tightly around his chest, holding him close, holding him safe. He’d been here before, many, many times over the course of his life. And he was pissed off about it.

Jason wriggled around and with all his force, pushed his father away. They were both breathing hard from the sprint, although Jason realized he’d momentarily forgot that his father actually _ran_ , not just from base to base but for miles at a time. For fun. They watched each other carefully, Jason and his father, like wild animals, seeing who'd make the first move.

“Hey _kid_ ,” his father went first, practically spitting in between inhales and exhales. “Are you out of your mind? You could’ve gotten hit by a car, you know bet—”

“Shut _up._ ”

“ _Jason._ ” His father reached out a hand to him but Jason swatted it away.

“ _Shut up!_ You lied to me!” Jason’s voice cracked, but he was too upset to stop now, feeling his cheeks and eyes sting with an uncomfortable warmth. He expected his father to reach for him again, but instead he just looked at Jason with those sad eyes everyone gave him—those “poor little boy” eyes he’d just _stopped_ getting after Whizzer died. The ones that saw how much pain he was in but weren’t actually capable of doing a single thing about anything, so what was the point of that, Dad? Jason wasn’t even sad—fuck off—he was angry. He was so fucking angry.

He balled up the front fabric of his father’s shirt in his fists, like bullies twice his size would do before shoving him into the lockers—Jason didn’t have that kind of strength, even when he tried to shake, and his father was still taller and broader than his lanky little arms, but he shook nonetheless.

“You lied to me! Again!” Jason could feel his cheeks getting wet now, the shame of crying only making him angrier. “You said you weren’t sick and you lied! We were going to be okay! Why do you have to ruin everything? Why did you lie?”

For the first time in a while, Jason wished something in this stream of consciousness he was spilling would instigate his father’s temper, wondering how low he had to go before his dad finally broke. He wanted him to break. He wanted him to be something other than sad. Be angry, be remorseful, be ashamed, be _something_ and maybe if he tried hard enough it would almost come close to how he’d made Jason feel, just now. Marvin and his stupid, homo face and his stupid, homo hands that were wrapping around Jason’s wrists, trying to get him to let go.

“Why would you do that? Why? Why would you do that, why—"

Before he knew it, Jason was enveloped again, this time into a hug, sobbing full volume into his father’s chest on the sidewalk. He’d been embarrassed to break first, that despite being a man now he was crying snot into his dad’s cotton shirt like he would’ve ten years ago.

“I’m sorry,” he heard his dad whisper into his hair. “I’m sorry, Jason. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.”

What Jason said next, he regretted now. Even if it was a little bit true, it hadn’t been fair, and it had taken the wind out of his father’s chest in a way Jason only ever wanted to do in theory. He could’ve just accepted the apology and let himself be comforted, but instead, what he said was—

“You never mean _anything_ . You didn’t mean to? You _did_.”

There once was a man named Marvin. He never meant to do anything. When he apologized after arguments, he said he didn’t mean to. When he hit his ex-wife in front of their only son and their psychiatrist, he said he didn’t mean to. When he lied about being sick, probably deathly ill, he said he didn’t mean to. When he stomped all over New York City, wreaking havoc and destruction like Godzilla, he said he didn’t mean to.

And Jason was clinging to him for dear life on a sidewalk in the sweltering heat because now he knew they had an invisible time limit on this sort of thing, and to let go was to leave the safe, close place to acknowledge the truth that yeah, things had, in fact, just gotten worse.

Mom found them like this after going in the opposite direction to try and catch up with Jason. She at this point, thankfully, had stopped crying, getting them motivated enough to trudge back to the apartment and on the same page. It’d been explained to them that he was taking early precautions, the likelihood he would get sick was high but not confirmed yet, that they were watching him, testing him against people who’d gotten really sick, to see where his health matched up. If he had it, at least they were watching him early, but everything was still premature. It was a much different song and dance than his typical “I’m going to fix this problem myself with my big, dumb brain, trust me, it’s fine, I’ll get what I want and you’ll be happy about it”, but it had the same moral didn’t it? “Everything will be alright”?

Bless his sweet, precious parents, honestly, for not knowing how much bigger this would be. Bigger than Whizzer. Bigger than just Whizzer, than wanting his father to live long enough to _live_ after Whizzer. Bigger than Godzilla. Bigger than New York. Bigger than God.

If Jason remembered correctly, now at 22 years old, they were still calling it GRID at the time, not HIV, not AIDS. They didn’t know how it was transmitted, or exactly how many people had it outside of the remaining who’d been diagnosed with an immune system deficiency but hadn’t died yet. They hadn’t started burning the ambulances after carrying AIDS patients, or rejecting bodies with HIV from funeral homes, or begun to fear kissing a well-dressed man on the cheek or shaking his hand. His father hadn’t started keeping his razors high on the top shelf of the bathroom closet yet, hadn’t yet taught Jason to shave by telling, not showing. Being gay wasn’t even legal in New York until 1980, homosexuality only just removed from the DSM a few years earlier. Hindsight was always 20/20 but it didn’t take a genius to say no one was going to rush to save victims of the gay men’s cancer, not the professionals, not the lawmakers, not a knight in shining armor, not the messiah.

* * *

 

So maybe wanting to sleep and actually sleeping were just two totally unrelated concepts, but once he’d started to see the sunrise, Jason decided with resolute, not that he _had_ to or _wanted_ to or would _like_ to get some sleep. He was. Period. _Was_ finally going to get some sleep. Jason had big plans to rest and take it easy this Sunday, to prepare for another week of classes ahead, to change out of sweatpants exclusively to change into even more sweatpants. It was going to be great because he was going to start his week right, with getting more than four hours of sleep in one go. He could feel it.

Except what he was feeling was Ben poking him in the face until he woke up, the light of day clear through the shades in their room.

“Your mom’s on the phone,” Ben practically bellowed, retracting one hand and shoving the other, holding the landline, right in his face.

“So you woke me up?” Jason yawned.

“You told me to in case she ever called you and you were asleep past noon.”

Jason ran a hand over his face, scrunching his eyes so hard he saw stars, before swiping the phone from Ben’s hand and holding it to his ear.

“Mom?”

“Not Mom.” It was Mendel instead, talking fast and sounding like he was trying to smile but also like he was a little distracted. “She’s right here too, though. Were you asleep? Your voice sounds froggy.”

“Nope, wide awake,” Jason lied, checking his alarm clock. 12:56 PM. He heard in the background his mother’s voice, tinny and worried, asking Mendel if he’d woke Jason up, asking why he would possibly be sleeping in the middle of the afternoon.

“Okay, listen,” he could practically hear Mendel wringing the kitchen phone cord in his tone, “I’m not implying you do anything with this information, but I thought it was only fair to let you know.” There was some fumbling, some whispering. “ _We_ thought it was fair. To let you know.”

“Let me know what?” asked Jason slowly, spreading the plastic shades at the window with his fingers to look at the icicles dangling off the fire escape, still not dripping even in mid-March.

His mother actually scowled in the background, her heels going _click, click, click_ , back and forth across their kitchen floor.

“Your grandparents are back up north, they moved to a nursing home in Scarsdale.”

Jason hummed. See, there were his mom’s parents, Zayde and Bubbe, warm and sturdy people, who’d been from New Jersey and been buried in New Jersey a long, long while back. Then there were Mendel’s parents, Zech and Miriam, decidedly title-less, who Jason had only met a handful of times, but enough to feel the same overwhelming presence Mendel also felt when they were around. And then, there were Grandma and Grandpa, who Jason hadn’t seen in an upwards of, oh, fifteen years, was it?

“My _dad’s_ parents? Really?” Jason tried to dig up as much as he could remember of the two of them, but he wasn’t awake enough to pin anything down about them in particular, other than, “I thought they were planning on staying in Florida, until like, forever?”

“Apparently your mother thought so too,” Mendel replied. “But your grandmother tried to get a hold of your mother this morning while she was out.”

“I’m sure she’s just thrilled.”

“You have no idea.”

It didn’t take too much effort for Jason to think about the wider implications here. On one hand, here were his two estranged grandparents, reaching out to him, conveniently, within 72 hours of being reminded of an assignment and dedicating an entire photography portfolio to his father. Within, what, 15 hours? Of deciding he would exclude the part of his father’s life that they existed in. The universe could not have been louder, frankly, but on the other hand, their silence all these years—birthdays, High Holy Days, graduations, his bar mitzvah, his father’s own funeral—now that was deafening.

“I wanted to make sure you knew they were here, just in case it was important to you that you see them—” Mendel was cut off by the sound of air wisping past the microphone.

“Jason, honey,” his mother was on the line now, apparently having successfully wrestled the phone from Mendel’s hands. “You obviously don’t have to see them if you don’t want to or if you’re too busy or...” his mother’s voice drawled, in a very specific way, like she was trying to accommodate him into not doing something she disapproved of.

“You don’t want me to go,” Jason said.

“It’s not that I don’t want you to go, I just don’t want you to feel _obligated_ to go.” Looking back, Jason could probably count all the things his parents definitely had completely agreed on with his two hands, one of them being they both could not stand his dad’s parents. Clearly, this had not mellowed with time for Trina.

“I,” Jason paused. On the other hand, Jason was, if anything, at his core, curious. Curious not just about the angle he could take this as a photographer, but even simpler than that, as a grandson. Other people liked their grandparents, right? There was the curiosity of knowing them, the chance to reconnect, perhaps. It could even be a nice thing, couldn’t it? He wasn’t counting on it, but wasn’t counting them out either.

But then on a corner shelf sitting in his consciousness, however, was the letter that was physically out in Dad’s old box, the graduation card from Grandpa. The _A Good Man Never Fails_ card. The don’t-fuck-up-and-you-won’t-deserve-it card. It poked, and prodded, deeper than Ben had just moments ago.

“I’ll think about it,” is what Jason decided on, answering firmly. That had been enough for his mother, for now, just enough that she obliged when he asked for the phone number and the name of the retirement home.

“If you’re going to not heed my warning _, at all_ ,” she griped, despite not giving him an actual, verbal warning. “At least let me know before you go. You’ll need a car to get there, anyway.”

Another five minutes on the phone, and a goodbye to both her and Mendel, and Jason was back under his covers, blankets pulled high over his head with just enough of a gap to stick his face out for air. He was going to sleep, he was out, it was time, good night everybody.

Not fifteen minutes later—not long enough for him to fall back asleep, but not short enough for him to be completely awake, either—Ben dawdled in with the phone again.

Jason groaned before Ben could poke his face this time.

“It’s your godmother, I don’t remember her name,” he clicked his tongue, tapping the plastic as he handed the phone to Jason, “the chipper one? The white one.”

Jason furrowed his brow, moving a little quicker to answer this one. “Cordelia?” He asked and answered all at once.

“Jason, _hi!_ ” Naturally, there was only one person in the world who said his name quite that sweet and sunny. “How _are_ you!" Only one person who could make a simple question sound like a cupcake or valentine.

He grinned, sitting up a little straighter in his bed. The Lesbians From Next Door were still filed definitively in Jason’s brain as such despite not having lived next to them in four years. As they maintained a relationship with him and his family this long after his father died, they’d become less of an enigma as time had gone on and he’d come to rely on them. Only a little bit less, however, but to be fair, they just kind of showed up one day and announced they were lesbians and then never left. Like he’d just gone to his father’s apartment one Friday and left that Sunday after spending the weekend with two nice ladies who really liked hanging out with his dad for some reason (the true mystery) with two more people who called Jason on Sundays now to talk to him or to ask him to come over so they could feed him.

They were special to Jason, first and foremost.

“I’m fine,”he couldn’t help but chuckle a little bit, “I’m good, how’re you?”

Second, they’d also been special to his father.

“Good! Great!” Ordinarily, this is where Cordelia would genuinely answer his ‘how’re you’ with a full-fledged answer, a story from her ups-and-downs with catering, an update about Charlotte, maybe a complete speech about the state of the world. He could tell immediately, however, that this call was not ordinary. “ _So good_ , in fact, we wanted to know if you were busy tomorrow night?”

Third, they would have to be in the project, definitively.

“Yeah, yeah I’m free,” he replied, not bothering to check and see if he was actually available, deciding to just make time being an incredibly ordinary action for him, personally. “What’s going on?”

Cordelia was absolutely beaming, he could tell even though he wasn’t looking at her that she was nothing short of thrilled at this moment, or at least, less thrilled than she normally was. “We just have a little surprise we wanted to celebrate with you. I’m making dinner, it’ll be fun!”

“Okay, yeah, awesome,” he replied, not awake enough to guess that the surprise was, but awake enough for his thoughts to flicker instead to the Columbia acceptance letter. “I have some news to share with you guys too, actually.”

“Oh _yay!”_ But seriously, what was he supposed to do? Frown? “Wow, we deserve some good news, don’t we? Oh, I’m so glad, it’s a date!”

Another five minutes on the phone, and a slightly more drawn-out goodbye to her and general well-wishes to Charlotte, and Jason was back under his covers despite his blankets now being uncomfortably warm. Third time was a charm, this was it, his time to shine, good night, New York.

Jason was up and starting his day five minutes later.


	4. i am living proof that cowards still can rise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took two million years to write because my life is a hot mess, please leave a comment if you relate

Like bottles tossed to the sea, what was out of sight drifted back in pieces if one looked for them long enough.

The Testas, made up of a father and a mother and a daughter right around Jason’s age, who ran around outside with him during the age where he did things like that, seemed to move overnight one October day when Jason was still small. Too small to notice they’d gone until he knocked on their empty house door, _For Sale_ sign looming in the yard like a scarecrow frowning for the crows. Too small to know what being under arrest for sodomy meant, only that Mr. Testa had, in fact, been arrested, as he heard from both Saul Applebaum Jr. and Angelina Dellibovi. Neither of them, nor any of the other kids in their neighborhood, seemed to be able to decide on a consistent or factual story regarding exactly what happened, or what it all meant anyway, but he was so small that the rush of the mystery had been more interesting than actually knowing what had happened. Jason went home with the intent to ask his parents for clarity, only to decide against it when it’d seemed like they and their walls were too cold and too tense, and told himself he would ask some other time. He forgot to ask them some other time. Jason didn’t remember the Testa girl’s name anymore.

One afternoon in the dead of winter, when Jason was maybe a sophomore or junior in high school, much to his chagrin, he’d come home to find his mother’s STD test report write-up tacked on the fridge, much like how she used to hang up his best test scores or good grades. He didn’t want to read it, or think about it, or think about why it was being displayed on the fridge of all places, but she’d highlighted the negative result for not one, not two, but three different diseases. Like, okay? Alright? Good for her? She was HIV-negative, so a small relief was had knowing his mother wasn’t also dying, he supposed (not that he’d been expecting her to?). But when he asked why she’d also highlighted hepatitis and syphilis, she’d just scoffed, and muttered something about how _he_ was lucky he was dying, or else she’d just kill him herself.

There was the time between knocking the ball out of the park at their first game of the season and his bar mitzvah, where being in middle school was easy given the support of the baseball team. Even if most of the other boys on the Jewish Center team were just as unpopular, socially inept, or otherwise uncool (if not more so than Jason) it was nice knowing there’d be more than just a few people at school who’d wave him down in the hallway, sit with him at lunch, share the snacks their moms packed in their brown bags, show him their comic books, not ask any more condescending questions about his father and his godmothers, and so on. And things had been so easy, so good at the time, that he hadn’t thought twice about it all, about having friends. Hadn’t thought for a moment, they’d begin to dwindle when he didn’t have a bar mitzvah they could come to, fade out when he said he’d been taking a year off from baseball, and disappear when rumors broke about his father and Whizzer.

Susanna Lynn Kushner, 18, of New York, NY, was killed May 31, 1959 in an automobile accident (involving one automobile, her automobile, and a tree in the Adirondacks). Born January 23, 1941 to Isaac and Rhoda Kushner, of Brno, Ukraine, and Long Island, NY, respectively, Susanna excelled in academics and was a gifted pianist (and a growing alcoholic). A recent graduate of Nightingale-Bamford School, Susanna was accepted to attend Barnard University in the fall on a music scholarship (and resented the way her parents called this her “Missus Degree”, as though she wasn’t skilled or serious or ready). She loved art, reading, sailing, hiking, (all true) and being with her friends and family (somewhat true, only if ‘friends and family’ meant exclusively her brother, three whole people in her large social circle, and their maids, on occasion). She is survived by her parents, Isaac and Rhoda (who would never speak of her again); her younger brother, Marvin (who was never prone to handling anything well, but would handle this exceptionally poorly); her best friends, Jessie Rupert and May Green (who would sustain complications from the crash well into adulthood, probably even up to now); and many cousins, friends, and classmates (Susanna was tired, tired of people, particularly of people who knew her, saw her, acted as bars on her cage). She is preceded in death by her paternal grandparents, Isaac and Alzbeta Kushner (from whom Susanna had gotten the long pin-straight dark hair, deep brown eyes, and long thin nose in the obituary photo that had been shot as a senior portrait); her maternal grandparents, Ivan and Esther Goldman (from whom Susanna had inherited generations of rage, of grief, of longing, of exhaustion, of things she wanted down and away); and best friend, Bette Kaplan (who’d sat around the fire pit that night with her three best friends at the campground, and said on her second beer that they’d never get old, they’d never lose their love, love was the most beautiful thing in the world, they’d have each other if not unimpressed men or self-esteem or anything else, and then died hand-in-hand with Susanna in the front seat of the family car).

One unusually brisk day during the June between high school and college (unusual in more ways than one as Jason had actually found it in him to get out of bed today), he’d gone downstairs to find Mendel, sitting alone at the dining room table, staring at his coffee but not drinking it. Unusually sullen, he said to Jason through an unkempt beard, in a way that was both convinced and needed convincing, that they were fine, it was a good thing that was happening, that Trina was taking a few days to herself, that was all. That she’d left this morning in the Toyota, that she’d call him that evening, that she would’ve said goodbye to him earlier but he’d been fast asleep, and she hated waking him up. Jason only blinked, thinking maybe he should feel shitty or abandoned but knowing better than to believe those were true, asked not where she was going, but why she left. Mendel relaxed immediately, explaining their relationship was fine, that was okay, just, in light of some of what had happened (just say _he_ _died_ , Jason thought) she needed some fresh air and time to think. It was, Mendel took a sip, a preventative measure, but did not expound, and was not pressed to do so. Jason found out later she’d gone to New Jersey to see her parents’ house, which now belonged to some other family, and the ocean from a beach near where she’d grown up. She said she missed him when she got home.

There’d been the weekend vacation Jason had gone on with his father and Whizzer, Cordelia and Charlotte, where he’d been told carefully to refer to Cordelia as his mother (“Dad, no one’s going to believe you two had a kid who looks as Jewish as I do”), where he’d watched their faces go blank when he’d accidentally called Cordelia “Cordelia” and someone asked what kind of boy called his mother by her first name. There’d been watching his mother slowly, but surely, find herself in friendship with The Lesbians, so much so that sometimes, the three of them just hung out and got their nails done and did whatever it was normal women in their thirties did because they were a normal group of friends, weren’t they? There’d been watching Mendel and his father do the same (be very normal, very masculine friends, that is, not a husband and ex-husband, not a therapist and a patient) the two of them sometimes standing outside after dinner, shooting the shit the way they’d watched their fathers do, but without the suits, because neither of them felt comfortable in a tie anymore, and without the cigarettes, because neither of them smoked anymore. There was his father quickly and aggressively turning off the answering machine and staring at the wall after missing a phone call from a Midwestern drawl insisting _“I’ve told you I don’t want any of his things he’s not my son anymo—”_. There was showing Mendel whatever hip coffee shop was cool with NYU kids this week, watching him formulate a rating for how this coffee measured up to the brew native to some hole in the wall he’d found during his days at Gratz. There was having a small crowd to look for in the upper corner of the stands for every single one of his high school baseball games and the difficulty of trying to coordinate who was bringing what for the next High Holy Day; there was the Christmas they spent carrying boxes into Charlotte and Cordelia’s apartment as the radio stations played “Soldier of Love” over and over and the inexplicable way every member of his small, strange family —not just his father, all of them—looked at him when he grew into and wore Whizzer’s worn leather jackets.

Each of these instances that Jason hadn’t seen in the few years they'd spent tumbling in the ocean came back with photographic clarity.

Unlike beach glass however, Jason could clearly see the edges of each of the memories he’d otherwise forgotten and where they each fit and connected with each other in the greater narrative of his life. Lines could be traced, squares drawn out, and one by one, they added up and attempted to reassemble into something like a bottle or dish, with use and purpose. Even if Jason could physically put together all of his memories, each smoothed over corner and edge worn down by the tumble of the waves, what could the bottle even hold now?

* * *

Remembering, in the hustle and bustle of his Monday, that he needed to grab the photos of Charlotte and Cordelia going whale-watching to gift them at dinner, was one thing. Reminding himself not to get off just after 77th Street because the Lesbians didn’t live there anymore, they’d moved to the Upper East Side years ago, Jason, get with it, that was another thing. The thing that would stop Jason’s constancy, his continuous and ceaseless hurdle from point A to point B this Monday (point A being his bed in the morning, point B being his bed at night), was, of all things, a baby gate.

He’d unlocked Charlotte and Cordelia’s front door with his spare key easily (painted with blue nail polish by Cordelia, though a bit chipped now). He’d kicked off his sneakers, wet from the melting sludge on the sidewalk, hung up his winter coat carefully among the small collection of fashionable and warm jackets on the rack. He’d checked to make sure he had the photos he’d planned to give them, the photos he’d planned to show them, and the thing that caught him in a trap was, in fact, a little white gate that came up to about his knees with a very complicated lock system. Cordelia called to him as he worked, carrying on a full conversation from the kitchen, all the way across the apartment, as Jason struggled to both answer her and to figure out the contraption. 

“We’re so happy you could make it!” Cordelia hollered, still sounding sing-songy even as she spoke full-volume.

Jason tried the lock again, his finger getting pinched yet  _ again _ . “Yep, wouldn’t miss it.”

“We’ve been super, crazy busy, which I’m sure you relate to, too, so we’re having leftovers from this wedding I worked last weekend, if that’s okay!” She said, on rhythm with the clanging of pots and pans against the countertop. “It was _ Italian _ , super delicious, super stressful, you know the drill.”

“No worries, anything’s good with me, you know the drill,” Jason replied, halfheartedly, yelping this time when the gate pinched his irritated index finger once more. 

“I made a little extra, just because it’ll probably be the last time I have a job like this for a while.” Cordelia was wiping her hands off with a towel when she came into the hallway from the kitchen, watching him bemusedly as he sucked on his red and wounded finger. Jason was a grown-up now, don’t be ridiculous, but it was easy some twelve years on to see why he’d had a small, small, tiny crush on Cordelia as a kid. Even in her favorite mom jeans and an old flannel, even approaching forty, even without makeup and covered head-to-toe in flour or sauce or something, she and her long, sunny blonde hair were just pretty. Even when she was laughing at him, not at all with him, Cordelia was pretty. 

“Why didn’t you just step over the gate?” 

Whatever look of realization that had dawned across Jason’s face made Cordelia toss her head back with a loud, shiny laugh before stepping in to gather him into a hug and a “hi sweetie how are you how’s your family” and showing him how to unlock the gate. It was complicated, she assured him, it even took Charlotte a few tries to get right.

“Why do you have one of those to begin with? And why was the wedding one of your last for a while? Did you guys get a puppy or something?” asked Jason, tugging on his camera bag as he followed Cordelia back into the kitchen, for which this apartment had been consciously picked out for, because it had easily twice as much working space as the kitchen they’d had in the old apartment, which did not provide a view of both Central Park  _ and  _ Roosevelt Island like this one did. They’d upgraded once Charlotte paid off her student loans and Cordelia was getting more and more catering work (courtesy of the nurses who’d been impressed with the leftovers from Jason’s bar mitzvah, and their fast-traveling word), and had gone where no dykes had gone before (in Charlotte’s words), into a neighborhood of people who could not deny their existence this close up and who valued things like hard work (whiteness) and family (straightness). It was radical, in a weird way, almost as radical as what Cordelia would say next, when she turned on her heel, handing Jason a piece of garlic bread with a knowing and giddily secretive look on her face. 

“It’s a big dog, isn’t it,” Jason said, before Cordelia could answer herself, looking around the apartment as a joke. “Where’s the new Saint Bernard, I wanna meet him.”

“ _ No, no dogs, _ I just don’t know if I should tell you without Charlotte here.”

“It’s a big deal, then?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Alright,” Jason said with a shrug and a bite.

“But,” Cordelia took a deep breath, only to light up brighter, “I’m going to tell you without Charlotte here.”

Jason grinned. “Alright.”

“She was supposed to be home by now, actually,” Cordelia trailed off, resting her elbows on the counter island (black marble with white specks, she’d picked it out herself), pouting at the clock. Jason mirrored her without thinking about it. “I wonder why she’s late today.”

“Late night at the hospital, I’m sure.” 

“Probably, I’m sure that’s all. Anyway, she’s late! Her loss! So...” Jason watched as Cordelia’s smile went from bright to anticipatory. “Want to hear our secret?”

Jason nodded. 

“ _ Soooo, _ the good news is...” Cordelia nearly whispered, leaning in to nudge shoulders and elbows like they were kids on the playground. This, what they were doing right now, was highly descriptive of their relationship, of what Jason liked about Cordelia; Cordelia and Jason had always been pegged as something of space cadets, goofy and curious and fixers. Maybe their brains didn’t work the same, but they didn’t work like anyone else’s either, and that wasn’t going to stop them, Cordelia would absolutely ensure, from having a good day, from acting their actual, young ages, from being alright. From leaning in to share good news like little girls whispered secrets on the school bus, like it was a magic spell instead of every day life.

“We got a call from the social worker.”

Having not quite registered the importance of what had sounded so off-hand, Jason just tilted his head.

“ _ They have a baby for us _ ,” Cordelia beamed, shaking her hands in two small, celebratory fists. “Yay!”

Jason dropped his bread on the island counter, immediately going in to give Cordelia hug. “Oh my god? Holy shit, that’s amazing,” he said to her, still with a mouthful of garlic and buttery carbs. Was he crying? He could feel a lump in his throat and his eyes starting to sting. No, he couldn’t be crying, that was ridiculous, don’t be ridiculous.

“They told us last week! We think it’s really gonna go through this time!” She said, much shorter than him now so that her voice was muffled by the knit of his sweater (see? He’d tried to dress up) when she spoke into his shoulder. “We’re gonna be moms!

The weight of this had gone unspoken. Maybe being around the families, and particularly, the children on the Upper East Side had been the cause. Maybe it was the fact they could easily afford it now, a child, thrice over probably. Maybe it was the bleakness that Charlotte’s job had become or Cordelia’s ongoing search for importance and purpose. Hell, maybe it was even Jason, and having a hand in being there for him and watching him grow up. But there’d been a steady, quiet, invisible push for and by Charlotte and Cordelia, in the last few years, to be parents and have a baby. Finding an agency that would even consider them, despite their income and spotless personal records, that had been one thing. The waiting game, the whiplash of being told there might be a baby, only to be denied yet again, that had been another. But Jason was over for dinner now, being told by a more obviously teary Cordelia that the baby had been left at the hospital last Friday, that they’d be able to pick him up this week, the social worker said. A baby boy, Cordelia whispered, wiping her tears with the dish towel she’d been wringing and folding in excitement and anxiety as they talked. 

“It feels like it’s all happening so fast, but also like it’s just been ages, you know?” Charlotte said, patting down her bottom lash line, like she hadn’t just casually described exactly what Jason had been feeling in his own life for the last few days.

“I do know,” Jason simply echoed. “But to be fair, you two have been waiting for this for a while.”

“We have, it’s just so crazy. Charlotte is so excited, wait ‘til you see her,” she squeezed his arm, before opening the oven to check on whatever was inside. “You know, he doesn’t even have a name yet. They’ve just been calling him ‘Baby’. Charlotte was thinking we could name him--”

Almost on cue, Charlotte appeared in the entryway to the kitchen, quietly, coldly. Almost undetectable at first, she stopped in the middle of the door frame to stare at them in their laughter in glee while also staring a good thousand yards behind them, off into the Manhattan skyline. A little tired, a little haggard, wide-eyed and bleary and a little? Scared? 

If only proverbially, it was like there were light years between them.

“I just need a second, before I join you two,” was all Charlotte stuttered, in a way that made Jason and Cordelia’s faces go serious, that drained all the sunlight from the room. “Hi Jason,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

“Do you need anything?” Cordelia asked, taken aback by the sudden turn of temperature.

“No, no, it’s going to be okay,” Charlotte begun to walk out of frame, back towards their room and the bathroom, running a hand slowly over her face. “Rough day, that’s all.”

Jason and Cordelia grimaced almost in tandem, knowing full well a “rough day” for Charlotte was nothing short of fully depressing or disturbing for just about anyone else on the planet. Once Charlotte was out of sight, Cordelia turned to Jason, grabbed his arm and pulled him in close. 

“I’m just gonna go back there and see what’s up, you can help yourself to whatever,” she waved her hand haphazardly in the direction of the stove and the aluminum tins that lined the counter, halfway filled with food.

“If you need me to leave, I can,” Jason whispered. 

“No, no, don’t leave. She loves you, she’d be so upset if she felt like she made you leave,” Cordelia paused, looking concernedly over his shoulder past where Charlotte had just been standing. “At least let me see what this is about first.”

And with that, it was just Jason and a kitchen full of Italian food, and the river view behind him, the city speckled with lights as the sun went down. 

Early in The Lesbians’ friendship with Jason’s father, during the weekends Jason spent on their couch, admiring an apartment that was actually put together and homey and not just trying to be, one of them would say something generous or optimistic or well-adjusted and Jason could see the look in his father’s eyes that restrained from absolutely crushing the sentiment. They’d been a good influence on him, on Marvin, in the months after he’d humbled himself with his own selfishness and was making the active attempts to be better to Jason and his mother, and were a good influence on Jason, even if he didn’t always listen to Charlotte’s warnings about the flu and Cordelia’s addendums to classic Kosher recipes. The thing about Charlotte and Cordelia, from then to now, was two-fold: first of all, they were not stupid, and second of all, they were not liars. They weren’t perfect, either—every relationship had work to do and baggage to carry—but the combination of these two key traits had made Dad, and made Jason, not just listen to what they said when they said it, but believe that what they were saying was true and build up to a level of trust neither of them had been able to manage in some time. So when Charlotte told Jason his father’s T-cell count and what that meant, he listened and believed. When Cordelia said that, yes, just folding safe-sex pamphlets was enough to be life-saving, please help, he listened and believed. When Cordelia said the football team wouldn’t follow him here, put this package of frozen peas on your face, when Charlotte visited him after being hospitalized for pneumonia and assured him no, he was not dying, relax, he believed.

The first cough he’d let rip had come something of a shock, as he’d never heard himself create something so wet and wracking and painful in his whole life. Ben, the only one of their trio with any formal medical training, limited to his years as a camp counselor in California, made Jason take his temperature and sit still so he could look down the back of his throat with a flashlight. 101 fever, coughing up mucus, and chills? This wasn’t even walking pneumonia, Jason, you look like shit, Jason, please go to a hospital. But the words “pneumonia” and “hospital” nearly launched Jason’s already fast heart rate into the stratosphere, and he hopped off the bathroom counter to push past Ben and back into their room, saying he was fine, he’d sleep it off, do  _ not _ call his mom, he was fine. Until he wasn’t, until he, shaking and bleary, checked himself into the ER in the middle of the night when everyone would be asleep and nearly passed out in the waiting room, waking up instead in his hospital room, IV to rehydrate, remote out to call for a nurse.

But he didn’t want to call a nurse, who he knew from his previous experiences in hospitals, would not fix him, even if they really wanted to. He didn’t want to call his mother either, who he knew from his experiences being so painfully hurt and letting it get so bad, would panic, would rush to him in worry, and he wouldn’t, couldn’t let his mother worry quite that much in the middle of the night. He’d call, instead, the number he had memorized for The Lesbians’ new apartment, and feel a violent quake run down his spine when he got the answering machine. 

It was probably the delusion of the fever wrapping its hands around his body and squeezing, but during the hours spent in the dark of the night, curled into his sheets and white-knuckling them for dear life, he was sure he was dying, because this is what it looked like to die. This is what it looked like to die.

Charlotte had shaken his arm until he woke up in the morning, standing above him (or, as far as she could stand above him, the hospital bed coming up near her navel), simultaneously crossing her arms and looking sympathetic, if such an expression were possible.

“You remember to get a flu shot?”

Jason blinked.

“That’s what I thought, you dummy. Did you call your mother?”

Jason shook his head. 

“Thought that too, so I called her myself. She’s on her way over. Completely rattled, so way to go on that one.”

Jason groaned.

“Chin up, you aren’t dying, Jason. You are, however, stupid for waiting this long to ask for help,” Charlotte helped herself to the chart and clipboard hanging from the edge of his bed, flicking through the pages like she was maybe a little more tense than she was letting on. “The message you left was almost incoherent, do you know that? I don’t know what kind of favors you thought you were doing for yourself or anyone else who worries about you. This isn’t like when you used to invite yourself over because you got a black eye from the assholes at school, Jason. You can’t just ice pneumonia away.”

Jason just nodded this time, swallowing hard before coughing up a storm again. Charlotte patted his sweaty, cold back through his hospital gown as he quaked, and shook, and gasped for air even when the coughing had stopped.

“Hey, you’re not dying, Jason. You’re not dying. It’s okay, I’m here. You’re okay.”

“She’s okay,” Cordelia said, having crossed the kitchen floor in her socks in near silence, touching his back as she came up behind him to glance out the kitchen window and into the sea of city lights. “She said to stay, there’s no point in having you come all the way up here not to at least get something to eat.”

Jason scoffed. “I’m glad keeping me fed is such a concern.” Cordelia grinned at that, briefly relieved, before her mouth sunk into a frown.

“Are you in an alright place to hear some not good news?”

“I’m fine,” Jason assured, eyebrows furrowed, “what’s wrong?”

“There was a death on the floor today, it was a baby,” Cordelia whispered, and looked at him with a pointed glance that could only mean one thing. 

“The baby was positive,” Jason hardly felt the words leave his lips, watching Cordelia bob her head up and down in something like slow-motion. “Within a few days of getting a call from the social worker for a baby to adopt.”

Cordelia sucked in air through her teeth, clicking her nails against the marble counters. “You got it.”

It didn’t take a lot to put two and two together. “That,” Jason shook his head, “makes for a pretty rough day.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary for her, but you know,” Cordelia shrugged. “Not great timing.”

“And you’re sure you want me to stay?”

“Yes, stop it. Stay!” It was back, the playfulness in Cordelia’s voice, even if it was a bit more practiced. “You said you had good news too, right? Wait ‘til Charlotte gets back, she’ll be thrilled to hear!”

“I’m here,” Charlotte announced, walking with her normal, if equally practiced, assuredness and her hair wrapped for the night. “Ready for the good news and a good meal.”

Where Jason had been a little in love with Cordelia, her pretty hair and the way she could make anything seem magical, extraordinary, easy, Jason had kind of wanted to  _ be _ Charlotte. The Charlotte who wasn’t just smart and could show it, but used her cognitive gymnastic ability, practically, here on Earth, to help people. The Charlotte who was ridiculed by her peers and showed them up every time. The Charlotte with a really impeccable taste in tweed pants and was honest to goodness optimistic in all things provable and sourced by science and what a little knowledge, a little elbow grease could  _ do _ . And you know, they were alike, a lot alike, had immediately taken to each other when they’d met some eleven years ago because they were so similar, and never more so than now, when Jason could identify the exact ways Charlotte was trying to deal with the weight of her day by masking it, by asking about someone else about their day instead. 

“Jason.” Charlotte clapped a hand on his shoulder before pulling him in for a hug (if Cordelia only came up to Jason’s shoulder, Charlotte was at about Jason’s sternum). “How good is this good news?”

Jason kind of smirked, but didn’t say anything to that, though not necessarily to build the dramatic tension bound to come with reaching into his camera bag, doing a bit of digging, and pulling out the Columbia letter. He slid the folded, crumpled sheet across the kitchen counter with a shrug. “It’s pretty alright, I guess.”

Much like he’d watched his mother do on Saturday, Jason watched as The Lesbians’ faces went from perplexed and focused on reading, to lighting up in realization. Charlotte got there first, where instead of pulling him in for a bone-crushing hug like his mother did, stuck out a hand to shake with his free hand. 

“I knew you’d get in, welcome to the family.” Charlotte stared at him with a look that could only be read as hope, no pride; this made Jason’s chest twinge, and not in a good way. A Columbia grad herself, Charlotte had been the one who encouraged him to apply, who said a kid like him could really make some much-needed waves in a place like that (you know, conservative and white and hateful of the patients she dedicated her life to caring for), could get the ball rolling on what she had (and he had, kinda) presumed would be the start to his civil rights law career. 

Cordelia, once she finished reading, had been the one to pull Jason into yet another hug. “He’s just so smart!” was what she said over and over, now, as well as in the past, when Jason had taken Cordelia to the library to help her push through the way words ran into each other in her brian, and helped her write up a grant proposal for the non-profit she was a part of. The one that raised money for AZT, for people who couldn’t afford it. The one she’d put in a good word for him at, the one that always could use a bit of legal assistance.

If he heard someone say “Columbia” or “law school” again in the next, oh, ten seconds, he was sure he’d be overtaken by some wild impulse to beat his head against the marble counter top.

“Good news is,” Jason searched, instead, for things to say, ways to bounce off of Columbia to literally anything else. “I’ll wind up staying in New York for the next couple years, at least.”

“I bet your mom was thrilled to hear that,” Charlotte said with a lighthearted smirk.

“You have no idea.”

“I didn’t think you were looking to leave New York?” Cordelia asked, moving to work pasta and green beans out of the tins and onto plates.

“I hadn’t really thought about it, honestly,” Jason shrugged. “It just seems important now, you know. To be around for Mom and Mendel, plus you guys and the baby.”

And that, right there, was probably the mistake.

The blunt and brute and immediate honesty that colored some of his more awkward memories of putting his foot in his mouth had dwindled with age and empathy. It didn’t mean it didn’t happen anymore, but in instances, like this one, where Jason didn’t stop himself from going full stream of consciousness and loosening up on the honesty, it made for other people to give their honest, awkward responses, such as: 

“Yeah,” Charlotte scoffed, crossing her arms in an attempt to stay casual, “as if there’s going to be a baby.”

A clatter. The attention of the room was whipped onto Cordelia, with her back to Charlotte and Jason, staring down at the tongs she had just dropped onto the floor. 

“Why would you say that?” she said, losing her softness, more like a statement rather than a question.

Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, just for a moment, and closed it. Jason grabbed the nearest roll of paper towels to wipe up some of the tomato sauce on the ground, rendering himself out of sight for the next big mistake, which was:

“I’m just tired of being disappointed.”

Jason searched, digging into his years of existing between his parents, for a way to transform the tension accumulating in a storm cloud above him into literally anything else. Think fast, Jason, they were beginning to get short with one another. Think, think, think.

“You’re over there still pretending like everything we’ve worked for is for nothing, it's infuriating.”

“I didn’t say anything like that, I just don’t think maybe we should get our hopes up so high.”

“Alright,” Jason said a little too loud and standing up a little too fast, leaning back and sitting up onto the counter, bringing his long legs up to cross them beneath him. “Sounds like what we need is to sit up on these counters and eat some food, right? Who needs tables?”

It was a classic set up, immovable object (Mom, mountains and death, the looming threat of the future descending upon Jason in the form of an acceptance letter and a final project, Cordelia) versus an unstoppable force (Dad, space and the ocean, Jason hurdling from point A to point B on a Monday, Charlotte). They could stay in a stand-off, for hours, all night if they wanted to, but Jason had read enough Batman as a kid to know they had no option but to collect their plates, sit cross-legged on the counter in silence for a few moments, and surrender. Some ten years ago, Jason would’ve been blunt and brute and reminded the Lesbians and anyone who would listen that this was not his job, nor his responsibility. Whether or not that was more mature than eating ravioli and meatballs on a fancy countertop in a hoity-toity apartment in the Upper East Side was to be determined, but it seemed to work, as the three of them sat in silence (Charlotte on the end towards Central Park, Cordelia on the end towards Roosevelt Island, Jason in the middle, next to the sink), tension melting onto the floor and rising like the tide to their buoys.

After some pause, Charlotte heaved a long sigh, breathing out through her nose while chewing on a piece of garlic bread.

“Two things,” she started, resigned and mouth half-full.

“Okay,” said Cordelia, looking at her plate instead of at Charlotte on the countertop across from her.

“One, this food is delicious. You did a great job.”

“Thank you.”

“Two, I didn’t mean to be so rude. I’m fine, I’m going to be fine, I just had a rough day and brought it in the house. I’m sorry.”

“Again, thank you.”

“That means you too, Jason. Sorry you got in the middle of my bad day.”

Jason shrugged, stabbing his green beans with so-so accuracy. “What were you supposed to do, come in tonight skipping and singing a song?”

Charlotte let out a quick, defeated laugh as a reply. “It’s okay,” Jason said, making a point to look her in the eye. “We understand.”

Charlotte wiped a hand down her face, her feet dangling and kicking lightly kicking off the top of their counter. She seemed to wait, hoping Cordelia would look up from her plate with those big blue eyes and invite a conversation with her, but there was no dice. She would instead have to heave another heavy sigh, as Jason watched, and say “Cordelia”, wait for Cordelia to glance up with the moons she saw the world with, and say, “I really want this baby.”

Cordelia melted a little, putting her plate down in her lap. “Me too,” she whispered.

“I’m also tired of feeling like I have to be disappointed all the time,” Charlotte said. “All the time. Like there isn’t one good thing that will work out in the world.”

Instead of answering right away, Cordelia put her glass of wine up to the air and waited for Charlotte to mirror her before they both took a drink. The weight of this would go unspoken, and Jason understood their frustration. There was, on one hand, the helplessness of standing in one spot, and on the other, the hopelessness of moving, moving, moving with no clear end in sight. Charlotte had a reputation of being one the go-to doctor in the city, one of the community, a black lesbian who would go the extra mile for you and your HIV-positive loved ones to make sure everything that could be done, was done. It wasn’t as though his father and Whizzer were the only friends of her and Cordelia’s that she’d treated and watched die in the last decade. It wasn’t as though Jason hadn’t heard through the grapevine some of the grittier details Charlotte and the rest of his family didn’t want to tell him about everything that was going on behind hospital doors, wanting keeping him in the sweet dark safety of childhood as long as possible. It wasn’t as though Jason hadn’t gone with them to the tamer of the protests or walks in an effort to garner funding, to raise awareness or support to watch not just The Lesbians, but thousands of people pray at once that maybe their helplessness would mean something. 

Who wouldn’t be worried about raising a baby when  _ this _ was what you saw, living a life, day in and day out?

“You know, I like to think that  _ we  _ are a good thing that worked out,” said Cordelia, bringing a bit of light back into her voice as she feigned insult. “I know I haven't gone to aerobics in a few weeks, but I still try to  _ work out. _ ”

Charlotte snorted, getting the joke, thank god. “That’s not what I mean. We’ll always be the best good thing in my life. Even if we don’t, technically, work out.”

Cordelia stuck out her bottom lip, thinking that statement was warm or cute or whatever, thank god. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

A few years ago, Jason would’ve stuck out his tongue and told them to get a room or something of the like. He knew better now, to look exceptionally interested in the food on his plate and the wine in his glass and give them the chance to make heart eyes at each other from across the kitchen.

_ Click. _

“Actually, can you two hold that thought real quick?” Jason asked, knowing they were just a pinch short of perplexed as he hopped down from the counter back to his camera bag on the island in the center of the tile floor. Pulling out the portfolio of photos he’d accumulated in the last few days, he explained the premise, that he was dedicating his portfolio to his father but also to the people who loved him. He didn’t let their eyes get too sad before pressing the story further, explaining that in his search through Whizzer’s old photo reels, there was a few of them he’d wanted to print, to gift them.

Jason laid each photo out carefully on the island as Charlotte and Cordelia followed suit, setting their plates to the side with a clink and coming down from their respective ends of the kitchen to wade towards the island, standing across the surface from him. “Take a look, let me know what you think,” he said, turning each picture right-side up for them, his conclusion falling on deaf ears as he watched these women, his godmothers, really, melt from curiosity to nostalgia.

The first reaction was a given, Charlotte held up the photo of Jason’s father side by side with Jason, across the island. “Holy shit,” she said, looking between both of them at the same time.

“I know.”

“He looks good here.”

“He looks how I remember him.”

The second, third, etc reactions, were also a given, as in attention moving quickly and excitedly from one photograph to another.

“Your mom looks beautiful, obviously.”

“Are these your friends from school?”

“Wow it’s the top of the old building!”

“I can’t believe you recognized it so fast.”

“Look at this tiny little man.” The cheek pinching, that he should’ve expected much sooner. “How precious.”

It didn’t take long for Charlotte to stumble upon the two pictures of a pair of young women, laughing in ugly plastic ponchos on a boat up north, being misted by the salty ocean water. The thrill on their faces, coming that close to Earth’s largest mammals, made for a pretty good photo op. Good eye, Whizzer. 

“Oh wow, that  _ is _ us,” Charlotte said, clearly taken aback as she squinted at the photo, like she was trying to make sure. “We look…”

“Young,” Cordelia finished, eyebrows flying up into her hairline, wrapping an arm around Charlotte’s shoulders as she leaned in to look closer. “We get to keep these?”

“Of course,” Jason replied. “For your anniversary.”

“Oh my God, our anniversary is…”

“Next week,” finished Cordelia.

“And _ you _ remembered?” Charlotte glanced back over at Jason, more surprised than anything else, or so he’d thought.

Jason shrugged. “This picture reminded me.”

Charlotte was hardly a crier, at least not in comparison to Jason’s tight-knit family. Never prone to an immediate flow of emotion and clearly not starting today, Charlotte’s nose crinkled up and she made a face that was close to crying, but didn’t generate tears. The expression was enough to set off the ohmygodareyoureallycrying alarm Jason had tucked somewhere in the back of his mind, and enough to get Charlotte a tug closer to Cordelia’s torso, her long fingers dragging up and down Charlotte’s arm. 

“I’m  _ sorry,”  _ she said, voice wet. “I had a long day.”

“It’s okay!” Jason answered, if a little too soon. “Please cry about it.” He cringed; Cordelia laughed at him again. “Er, it’s okay to cry about it.”

“That sounds about right,” said Cordelia. “Everything’s fine, if you gotta let it out, let it out.”

Charlotte just sniffled, shaking her head instead. “It’s not that, it’s just _ — _ Jason, I think the work you’re doing is not just good, but important.” She made sure to look Jason right in the eye when she said that, like she always had when she was telling the truth. “It’s important. I’m excited to see the finished product.”

The room seemed to take a collective deep breath, The Lesbians retreating back into that place of nostalgia that came with examining photographs of old friends and older times. If not for the photos scattered on that black and white marble island, from where Jason was standing, the counter blended in into the large window overlooking the New York night sky, making the Lesbians, standing close, eyes distant, look like they were floating together in outer space.

You know, the lighting here was quite good.

Jason slowly but surely picked up the camera he had in the bag by his ankles and quickly snapped three photos in rapid succession before anyone could say anything.

“Hey!” Cordelia protested in a playful sort of disgust. “I was  _ not _ ready for a photo, sir!”

“Relax, we’re going to be in his project, hopefully looking just as good as all these other photos,” said Charlotte, looking much less surprised, if just as honored as Cordelia was.

“You want  _ us _ in your project?”

“Of course. Unless you don’t want to be”

“We are his godmothers,” Charlotte continued, “and he’s our son’s godfather, it makes perfect sense.”

“Wait,” Jason blinked. Once. Twice. “I’m what?”

The Lesbians looked at each other, back at Jason, back at each other, and back at Jason with warm knowing smiles.

“It’s good that you’re staying in town,” Charlotte explained, slowly, like she had a secret. “We wanted you to be the godfather of our son, when he comes.”

Cordelia nodded fervently in agreement. 

“It might be nice for him to, I don’t know,” Charlotte trailed off, waving her free hand vaguely, trying to be cool and casual. “Have another guy around, to do whatever men do, you know. This world isn’t getting any easier to live in, he’ll need all the help he can get.”

Cordelia beamed a big wide sunny grin. “Surprise!”

Jason took a deep breath but felt his eyes well up much, much faster than he’d anticipated. He could tell, by the warmth in his face and knot rising through his throat that he was pulling a Charlotte _ — _ grimacing instead of crying.

“Oh, is he crying?” asked Charlotte, genuinely surprised.

“I can’t tell, honestly,” said Cordelia.

“I am not.”

“See what you’ve done? You’ve made him emotional.” 

“I’ll have you both know, I have never once cried, in my entire life,” Jason said, just as a tear snuck past his lashes to roll down his face.

Cordelia took one of his hands to hold from across the island, as Charlotte said, with eyes that knew better, “I believe that.”

* * *

 

If you’d asked Jason at six years old, what was the most fear he’d ever felt in his life was, he would recall standing at the edge of the ocean on a beach in New Jersey after seeing the trailer for  _ Jaws _ on the television a few times. Jason was sure this would be it for him, tears streaming down his face with his arms wrapped around his mother’s neck, begging his father to come in from the water. 

If you’d asked Jason at eleven years old, what was the most fear he’d ever felt in his life was, he would recall watching his father crack a hand across his mother’s face, unprompted and erratic, when he’d finally got his wedding invitation in the mail and stomped over to their house to let them know just what he thought. Jason could recall even now, with white hot clarity, the pain on his mother’s face, juxtaposed to the black mark scratched out over what was meant to be the father he couldn’t seem to recognize. It was such a moment of loud static noise for him, realizing with full, twisted, sickening understanding that this painful thing that had felt so singular and isolated to his family was indeed, not a game. His petulance had been folly, his pride divisive, his naivete embarrassing. There were no black and white squares to play to, just a continuous stream flooding their home with what did you do? Why? What have you done? Why? Why would you do that?

If you’d asked Jason at seventeen years old, what the most fear he’d ever felt in his life was, he would shrug and make something up. He wouldn’t immediately name the biggest scary things. They seemed to have paled with distance and time, now, and he didn’t want to revive them by thinking about them too hard, not when his day-to-day had become this much of a tightrope, of a guessing game, a knife throwing contest. Dad was losing weight, Dad had a cough, Dad developed a big brown patch on his forearm that he thought Jason hadn’t seen. Jason had seen and held his breath. Held his breath until he had to shrug and lie. Rinse. Repeat.

If you’d asked Jason at twenty-two years old, what the most fear he’d ever felt in his life was, he’d probably shrug and say any of the things he’d felt at seventeen, eleven, six, or so on. He might add the time he’d gone to a messy frat party and couldn’t find  any of the friends he’d came with when the cops busted in the door, he might add watching someone fall onto the tracks of the subway when their blood sugar was low and the rush of trying to get them on the platform to safety, the time he thought someone had broken into the apartment, the time he’d been hospitalized for pneumonia, and so on. He didn’t think the dread of calling back Columbia was enough to be included in his top three, top five moments of fear, but hell if it wasn’t absolutely paralyzing to think of now, laying in bed, staring at the ceiling. What was scarier than working to do something, one big, prestigious, important thing, for years, achieve exactly what you wanted, knowing how many people you could help, you could save with your work, and wonder suddenly, if that’s what you wanted? What kind of person did that make Jason, if he was enough to  _ stop it _ , to serve the victims suffering into perpetuity, and to resist? 

Honestly, a few things were scarier than that, Jason was nothing short of sure. He’d seen them himself. But the sinking sensation in his gut made him think they were all staring back at him too.

* * *

 

Professor Fraser expressed joy once a year, as the stories went. Once in a blue moon, if one looked in the opposite direction of, say, a public humiliation, one might see a jack-o-lantern grin spread wide behind Fraser’s bushy grey mustache. Where upperclassmen had tried to hide behind Jason in the hallway when Fraser walked past them during his freshman and sophomore years, Jason told new students now that Fraser was hardly as scary as he seemed. He had nothing, really, to base this assessment off of, but they believed him, because it was well-known that Fraser had favorites, and Jason happened to be Fraser’s shining star in his cohort.

Not to say he’d get an A+ on his senior project or a free pass to the staff showcase based just on his reputation, however. Fraser hadn’t written his own reputation in fairy tales and storybooks, after all, and the staff showcase had the renown it did because of the renown he held in the world of photographic journalism. There was a near annual upset for prized students who got too comfortable and too complacent; Jason, however, while being neither of those things, was mostly just a procrastinator and that, he thought to himself as he collected his prints of his mother, of the Lesbians, of his friends, of his father in 1981, and a few from the top of his old apartment building for good measure, with twenty minutes to spare before his meeting, would be his downfall.

If Jason looked cool and collected walking into Fraser’s office, decorated wall to wall with the awards that’d made him untouchable, so shiny Jason could see his own face in the gleam, with a minute to spare before the door would be closed on him, it was very, very intentional.

With a grunt instead of a greeting, Jason was left in silent limbo to stare between Fraser’s three prized  _ TIME Magazine _ covers, the two-page spread for National Geographic of the rare Honduran Emerald in flight, and the original film roll of the display he had at the MoMA, a natural exhibit more in vein with Edward Weston than Ansel Adams, unique and enigmatic in style.

“They’re lovely photos,” was what Fraser had said first, after about five minutes of complete and utter silence, which genuinely the worst thing he could have said. Fraser could have outright told him that the portfolio had insulted him personally, was a disappointment destined for failure, let alone a waste of precious time, resources, on top of four years of work. But why use so many words when he could just say ‘these are lovely’ and assure Jason it meant the exact same thing. 

Jason kept steady, focusing on keeping his body very still as he watched Fraser analyze each corner of his prints, holding them up to the light, scrutinizing every detail through squinted eyes. Jason held his statuesque pose for another five minutes before Fraser moved on to his second point.

“This is the biggest project of your college career, Jason, you understand.”

“Yes?” Jason furrowed his brow. “Of course.”

“I don’t care if you got into Columbia, you still have this project ahead of you before graduating. Eight to ten photos before you get that diploma and hit the road.”

“I understand.”

“These are genuinely excellent photos. Extremely well-composed. A different camera than your norm, presenting a good challenge. All hope is not lost here, Jason.”

_ Ouch _ . “But?” Jason asked.

“I tell you to be provocative and you bring me family photos.”

Jason blinked. There were a lot of things he could’ve said to this. What’s more provocative than being an accidental pregnancy in middle-class Jewish America? Than your father dying of AIDS along with his boyfriend and your mother marrying your father’s shrink? Than happy and functional lesbians? He was using Whizzer’s actual camera for crying out loud. Fraser was the last person on Earth who would want to hear any of this, obviously, both because he didn’t care for tragic backstories or what would be the most basic statement of facts. What he did care about was that Jason’s project, somehow, was not enough, in some way, and that despite all the work he’d done, it wasn’t up to par. Despite the technical achievement, the creation of what made a great image from the ground up _ — _ he was doing everything right, minus the procrastination, but he was missing  _ something _ . 

“I want it to be simple,” is what Jason actually said to this.

Professor Fraser slowly began to shuffle the photos he’d brought in back together, back into Jason’s portfolio before handing it back to him. 

“Anyone else,” Professor Fraser held the portfolio out for Jason to take; Jason took hold of it but Professor Fraser would not release, “and I would tell them this is an awful idea.”

Good thing it’s me then, is what Jason wanted to say.

“I won’t let you down,” said Jason, before exiting the office with a newfound resolve to figure out something  _ good. _

* * *

 

Jason had been working on his bed Wednesday night, only half-invested in some sociology reading but still focused enough to not have to read the same sentence over and over and over. His handwriting took a sharp right turn at the startling sound of something hitting the living room wall. Hard.

Tip-toeing across the floor—like being quiet mattered now—Jason opened his door to find Marnie, sitting cross-armed, legs-splayed in one of their kitchen chairs, glaring at the wall. On the floor, just below where the  _ crash-bang-slam _ had undoubtedly been made, lay one of Marnie’s dance shoes.

Jason looked between the shoe, the wall and Marnie, shoe, wall, Marnie, shoe, wall, Marnie, for good ten seconds, before they both attempted to fill the silence. 

“Are you oka—”

“I just got off the phone.”

“With whom?” asked Jason.

“My parents,” Marnie said, face flashing dark and. Angry. “They don’t want to come to my senior recital. I can tell. They keep trying to find these bullshit excuses and.”

A hard stop. Marnie stuck out her chin, shaking her head, refusing to go on. Without warning, she snatched the other shoe from her bag and hurled it at the same wall, Jason rushing to close the door for protection, but it was no use, the  _ bang _ echoed throughout his bedroom. 

Jason slowly opened the door again, sticking only his head out. Now, Marnie sat with her whole body constricted to the single wooden chair, knees to chest.

“I shouldn’t have to beg them to love me,” she said, defiant.

_ Click. _

Then don’t, said Green Dad, back again and just as spiteful and tired as ever. Don’t beg, demand. 

Because that worked out swimmingly, fabulously, every time.

“You’re right,” said Jason, instead.

“I’m doing everything right,” Marnie’s voice was getting louder, her hands contorted into claws as she used them to talk animatedly. “I’m doing everything right and they don’t even care. I don’t understand _ —ugh— _ I could just scream…”

“Maybe you should?”

Marnie squinted at him. “That’s...what?”

“You still look mad, it might be fun do just do something.”

“And by something, you mean screaming?”

“Sure.”

It was by no means elegant, but there was something exceptionally fun about primally yelling  _ FUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKK IIIIIIITTTTTTTT AAAAAAALLLLLLLL   _ from the top of their lungs into the March setting sun. They’d go back in forth, Jason starting with a whisper, Marnie to a library voice, Jason to an inside voice, only to work their way up to full-on belting, whooping, hoarse-hollering. It’d begun to warm up, just a smidge, just enough that Jason didn’t grab his winter coat before stepping out onto the fire escape, instead grabbing Whizzer’s worn black leather jacket with the big pockets, leaning into whatever sliver of spring he could get at this point. Marnie paused, voice a little rough, to tell him the jacket was cute on him, he should wear it to her recital, all the straight girls in the department would go googly eyes, to which he launched back into a loud, whooping  _ FUCK IT ALL. _

“Only because you asked so nice,” he replied, just before some neighbors across the alley let out a long, unified  _ SHUUUUTTTT THHHHEEEEE FUUUUUUCCKKKKKK UPPPPPPPPPP.  _ Before Marnie and Jason could reply, some several stories below, Ben yelled, right on time,  _ PPPPPPPEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSS. _

They’d been laughing so hard, Jason didn’t hear the beep of the answering machine and the message that would be left recorded from his grandmother.

 


End file.
